Timestep Trilogy
by Allan Squidman
Summary: This is actually original, but the idea to give our OC's superpowers was largely inspired by Heroes. Four young adults with extraordinary abilities must save the world after the accidental creation of a bizarre antimatter-producing creature brings all into peril. I did not write this story. Credit for prt 1 goes to my brother while I wrote part 2
1. Chapter 1

It was a small, seemingly ordinary hill in no significant region of town. Nothing noteworthy had happened there in the recent past, but somehow Allan Kidman materialized there for no apparent reason at all. He appeared a few inches above the ground, and hit it with a minor force before quickly springing to his feet.

Allan Kidman was not what any chronicle would call a 'superhero'. Yes, he possessed unusual capabilities and yes, he used them to fight evil and defend the world, but he found no need for a secret identity, mask, cape or tights. He did not wear glasses to avoid being recognized in his usual life, or rather, he only had one life. Sitting at home watching television and running around fighting crime were not two sides of the same coin but two areas of the same big picture. And he certainly did not _look_ like a superhero. His eyes were plain old brown, his hair was long yet neat and plain old brown, his chin was an average size and shape, and he kept his underwear… well… under.

For a little while he stood in bewilderment surveying the scene, as if it appeared unusually calm to him: Cars driving by, people going places, coming back from other places and talking on cellular phones. The only unusual part of the scene was the fact that a twenty-four year old man with hydrokinesis and the ability to breathe underwater appeared out of thin air, and this was the only thing no-one seemed to notice. Suddenly a look of urgency shot across his face.

"I can still stop it!" he said aloud to himself, and sped home.

Back home Zoë Wright was waiting for Allan to return along with Victoria Honeywell (more commonly referred to as Vicky). They left a few minutes ago, on foot. Allan burst through the door breathing heavily from running the whole way, but he didn't seem the least bit interested in pausing for a rest.

"That was fast," was Zoë's remark.

"Where's Edward?" Allan demanded.

"He hasn't come back from that excavation site yet. Where's the pizza... Where's Vicky?"

Immediately Allan turned his eyes to the clock visible through the kitchen door. He narrowed them in thought, mouthing the time to himself, and with the return of the urgency once again spoke aloud to himself "We're still at the pizza place!"

Something seemed strange to Zoë which she couldn't place. In fact it was Allan's weapon of choice, a trident, which stayed behind in his room when he left earlier but was now somehow strapped to his back when he came in.

He then turned to a confused looking Zoë and said "You have to take us there, now!"

Speed was not a problem for Zoë Wright. An incident at a nuclear reactor some years before that would surely have caused her death in any other circumstance not only left her strangely unharmed, but endowed with a remarkable power over electricity. She could generate and discharge it and found many other ways to use it as time went by, which included propelling her limbs to unimaginable speed without tiring her muscles. She wasn't particularly strong, but even dragging someone like Allan (who was average-to-tall in size but still a good deal larger than she was) along still left her much faster than anyone could run. Yes, she was quite a small girl, but small in such a way that most outfits in her size were rather tight in certain regions. Her facial features were more colorful than Allan's: Her lips were notably pink, her eyes large and undeniably green, and her hair as bright and dark red as naturally possible. Despite all of this, what stood out most –almost literally- about her face were her eyelashes: they were thick and dark and had no use for mascara.

They came to a standstill outside their favorite pizza place and Allan rushed inside followed less urgently by Zoë, who stopped in the doorway and opened her mouth. Inside was Vicky with her eyes wide, Allan with a look of astonishment, and another Allan with the same urgent look with which he came into the building just ahead of Zoë.

"If I took a moment to explain this now we'd never make it in time. So everyone, please get over the shock as quickly as you can. We have to go and we have to do it now," was all he had to say at the moment.

Vicky was in the taller domain between Allan and Zoë as far as height was concerned. Her eyes, too, were brown, but a warmer, friendlier brown. Her lips were full and red and reminded of ripe, succulent fruit. Her hair was as black as the ink used in calligraphy and despite being female she had the strongest limbs in the group. She was an expert mountain climber and was most at home surrounded by nature. Despite her outdoorsy personality she had no tan.

Meanwhile, Allan's brother Edward was half leaning against, half hiding behind a large rock, waiting for the team's Arch-nemesis to appear out of the sky and steal whatever was being excavated from the archeological site in front of him. Archeologists, news reporters, cameramen and other people in hard hats stood in silence as the winch slowly lifted something very old and mysterious from a deep hole in the ground. It was bolted to a platform and looked like a large wooden frame about the size of a door and had two triangular protrusions at its lower laterals which enabled it to stand upright. Mounted to its top beam was something which vaguely resembled a torch. The people on the surface held their breaths as they waited to lay eyes upon it. None of them knew what it was, or what it was used for.

Edward Kidman was facially very similar to his brother Allan save a pointier nose which supported a pair of spectacles. He had once been abducted by Hazard Inc (the large evil corporation bent on conquering the world that so often features in chronicles like these), which was governed by a man known only as Leather Jack, called so due to his long brown leather jacket and brown leather hat which he wore whenever anyone saw him. During his time of imprisonment, Edward had fallen victim to one of Hazard Inc's many inhumane experiments. This one was the development of a synthetic gland that enabled its user to secrete any element of the periodic table through their skin, and somehow remain unharmed by any adverse effects. By the time the team managed to rescue Edward the gland had already been inserted and was working perfectly, and it was this new ability that Edward used to destroy all the research Hazard Inc had conducted and stolen to create the gland. In destroying the research, Edward knew that Hazard Inc could not make another, and could never bestow their army of synthetic life forms with the power it contained. Hazard Inc knew this, too, and also knew the only way they could replicate the gland was by recovering the prototype and studying it. As Edward didn't feel like having himself cut open a second time, he was not on very friendly terms with Hazard Inc.

"How can you be from the future?" Allan panted as he ran.

"Near future. Much nearer than is at all convenient," was the other Allan's reply

"I don't understand," Vicky said quizzically "Do you and Edward find a way to travel through time in the near future?"

"Not if I can help it," Allan answered, although it didn't seem to answer much.

The four young people pounded down the road in much this manner the rest of the way, each enquiry answered urgently and cryptically, as if this self-proclaimed 'future Allan' was trying above all else to cause none of this to matter in the end. In reality, he was the only one who knew what was happening so far, and he was doing his best to ensure that the things he knew never came to pass.

By the time they reached Edward the relic was nearly visible to the masses behind the safety tape, the lone man hiding behind the stone, and the screen in the large blimp that hovered unseen above all their heads. Edward did not notice the rest of his team - one member in duplicate - come up behind him.

'Psst, Edward.'

'What are you doing here, Allan?' he whispered without noticing he was talking to one of three identical people, as opposed to the usual two, 'we agreed that if I came alone I'd be less easily spotted.'

Vicky, Zoë, and the other Allan stared at him.

'Edward, we have to get away from this place. Something terrible is about to happen.'

'I know. That's _why_ I came, remember? I have to stop Leather Jack from stealing-'

Just then the five became aware of a large amount of people gasping at the site of the artifact explained earlier meeting the light of the Sun.

'What is it?' said the Allan who didn't know what it was

The other Allan started to frown. He whispered slowly: 'Whatever you do-'

The next moment Leather Jack descended in a harness and landed on the platform, holding the lower end of another harness in his hand, which he fixed to the relic. He then produced a small but potent cutting torch and instantly severed the cable that was hoisting the relic out of the earth. He gave the other harness a tug and then started to rise along with his newly found loot.

Zoë launched herself over the stone they were hiding behind and whipped out her chain. She snagged the harness and clung to it before Edward landed behind her and took over holding onto it. Vicky shifted to her other form: her long hair went from black to blonde and her outfit went from a blue top and skirt to a flowing white dress. She stretched her newly formed wings out. Zoë then converted her body mass to electricity and passed through her chain, appearing on the other side of it the next instant. Edward threw his sword to her and she cut the harness. As her foothold plummeted to the ground she was caught in mid air by Vicky, who drifted gently to the ground and set her down safely. With a smirk Leather Jack let himself down to earth and brandished his knife. The fight had begun.

Allan drew his trident (future Allan had brought it from home in case it was needed) and jumped into action. Future Allan shook his head and did the same, he seemed a trifle annoyed. Edward prepared his palms with Iron and was able to block all cuts. Zoë stopped some of the swipes aimed at her with her chain, the rest she dodged by propelling herself with blasts of lightning. She knew that if she tried to zap Leather Jack, all the electricity would load into his blade: He learned from experience to insulate the handles of his knives. She waited for an opportunity to curl her chain around his wrist. Back in her usual form, Vicky beat her to it, doing so with her grappling hook. One of the Allans tried seizing the opportunity to pin Leather Jack's hand to the ground with his trident, but he twisted and ducked smartly and the trident merely stabbed through the rope. Leather Jacks hand was free again. Inside Edward's fingertips phosphorus atoms were constructing themselves and as they passed through his skin they met on the iron padding in his palm and formed a neat ball which Edward threw just as it burst into flames. Leather Jack punched at nothing with his previously bound fist and caught the ball of fire with the severed hook, which pierced it, swung round on its length of rope and flung it back at Edward. Edward dodged the fireball which caught the top, torch-like part of the relic and set it alight. It burned, but like something that was meant to burn. The fire did not spread to the rest of the relic, rather the fire turned an ominous green, and the air within the frame began to darken. The Allan that knew what was happening froze in fear.

Edward stared mesmerized into the paper thin film that was forming within the bounds of the frame. It developed a dark red tinge along the upper area. Edward knew this was a negative image of the sky but didn't think much of it because the reason he knew was even more startling. Edward Kidman was staring wide-eyed at a negative reflection of himself. Now on the platform, he inched closer and tried to touch it but was awoken from his trance by the only person who realized what was happening.

"Edward! Don't go any closer to that thing!" roared the future Allan, who had just escaped a moment of mental paralysis of his own.

Edward tried to back away but the platform shook: Leather Jack had secured the harness to the platform again and it was being lifted by his blimp. The sudden slant threw Edward off balance and he fell through the frame, passing through the film-like screen as if it was not there. He landed on the platform a few feet away and looked back at the frame. The film was intact but his reflection was gone. Eventually he slid off the platform and landed on the ground. When he looked up he discovered his cohorts were staring at him again. He turned his head and met a familiar gaze: sitting in front of him was his reflection from the mirror, in negative, but the mirror was no longer there.

It happened that when Edward fell through the mirror, his reflection fell out on the other side and hit the ground at more or less the same time he did. Now the reflection stood up, and ran off without saying a word.

The Allan from the future was still the only one with any Idea what had happened. He stared blankly and said only: "I failed."

Ages ago a civilization, now extinct, developed a special mirror of which the purpose was to bring balance to the world. This was as much a good thing as grey is white. Whatever passed through the mirror, the mirror would create the antithesis of it, which meant just as it could create something good from something evil, it could also create something evil from something good. Anything perfectly balanced would merely be replicated. Once the mirror was made the civilization soon plunged into chaos and was annihilated: in a twist of irony, the mirror created the opposite of the balance it was meant to create. All that remained of the civilization was covered up by centuries of dust.

Back home, Edward had gotten over the shock of two Allans and the situation was now being discussed openly.

"So, what you're saying is that this thing that came out of the mirror is the exact opposite of Edward?"

"Seems that way. Where Edward is able to produce matter, it can produce antimatter. I don't think you need any convincing about how dangerous it is." the Allan from the future was unaware of the entire history of the Balance Mirror, as they decided to call it, he knew only what he was able to learn from the events leading up to his trip twenty-eight hours into the past.

"But, how did you manage to travel to the past to come and warn us?" Zoë wanted to know.

"Sheer luck." said Allan, and they all waited for an explanation. Allan swallowed and shut his eyes. "Tomorrow afternoon that thing is going to use its powers," he spoke slowly "to create a black hole." This was a new shock for the team to deal with "I got sucked into it and managed to travel back to this time. It was just luck. Who _knows_ what happened to the rest of the world. I thought I could use this second chance to keep it from happening, but obviously I haven't."

But if you managed to stop the black hole from happening, you couldn't have used it to come back here and stop it." Vicky ventured.

"Not necessarily," Edward interjected "there are many theories regarding time travel and paradoxes, but no-one knows for sure how it works because it's never been done. Until now," He added.

"That's right," said Allan, "I guess I was hoping however it works the timelines would sort themselves out. All I know is that our best chance for survival would have been to keep this whole thing from happening."

"We could wind up stopping the black hole and carrying on the rest of our existence with an extra Allan in the team."

One of the Allan's put his arm around Vicky, but retracted it at a jealous stare from the other. While Allan and Vicky were indeed a couple, a second Allan was complicating things.

"How are we going to stop the black hole? The thing that creates it has already come into existence and there's no stopping _it_." Allan explained.

"What do you mean?" said Vicky "Can't we just seek it out and kill it?"

"We tried that," said the future Allan, "Whatever we throw at it, it just cancels out with antimatter. It's beyond frustrating."

"Maybe we just haven't been trying hard enough." was Edwards guess.

"Hang on," an idea was slowly coming to the present day Allan's mind "if this... Anti-Edward is able to cancel out any of Edward's materials, and he is no more than a reflection, wouldn't that mean that our Edward could just use matter to cancel out any of his?"

"No." The Allan from the future seemed to have already thought of this. "Theoretically maybe, but our planet is one of matter, so the molecules in the atmosphere already serve to cancel out his antimatter. For this reason he can't _launch_ his attack like Edward can, but it's the black hole we need to worry-."

"Wait, hear me out." Allan interrupted. "Maybe Edward has the power to cancel out the black hole?"

The others looked at him for a while.

Edward began: "impossible. I can only assemble the atoms from the sugar in my blood. When that runs out I'm done, and in desperate need of carbohydrates, too."

"Think about it," Allan persisted "if he's just a reflection of you with opposite yet equivalent abilities to yours, then you should have the potential to match his power and cancel it out."

"You mean," Edward considered the implications of this "I could make a black hole, too, but one of matter instead of antimatter?"

"Maybe not a black hole," Allan continued, "maybe not something that pulls everything into itself, but something that pushes everything out with phenomenal force." He looked at Edward as if to say 'You know what I'm thinking.'

Edward stared back at his brother. "A... a supernova? Could I _do_ that?"

"I hadn't thought of that," said the future Allan quietly, but as if hope was returning to his mind.

For a moment they were all quiet, but neither of the girls seemed to like this idea.

Vicky spoke first: "a supernova _and_ a black hole, both in the same place? Both on the surface of a tiny, tiny planet? Wouldn't that certainly destroy everything _and_ every _one?_ "

"It might, Vicky," said Allan "but a black hole certainly _will_. On the other hand, if we can get this exactly right, maybe the pull from the black hole and the push from the supernova will cancel each other out while the black hole sucks up the supernova and the immense amounts of matter and antimatter eliminate each other until there's nothing left of either."

"I know extremely dangerous doesn't even begin to describe it," Edward supported," but if it can save the planet, I _have_ to try it. But what exactly do I have to do to _cause_ a supernova? I mean it's not like I can practice, is it?"

At that moment Edward realized that Zoë had fallen silent. When he looked at her, he saw that her eyes were welling up with tears.

"Wouldn't that certainly kill _you_?" She was trembling.

"I really can't say," then he paused, "but if I'm capable of this sort of thing, wouldn't that be for the best? What if I tripped and did it by accident?"

This didn't make Zoë feel any better. She stormed out the room crying and Edward followed her. Edward and Zoë were a couple too, and the team of four had been through so many adventures together they were as close as family.

On that day Edward and Zoë promised each other they would not think about this worst case scenario. The others agreed to hope it wouldn't come to that.

Once everyone had recomposed themselves it was time to discuss their next course of action. First thing was definitely first: they had to get the balance mirror back from Hazard Inc before Leather Jack did any more evil with it. No one wanted to consider the type of consequences that could arise from an evil organization with that sort of power at their disposal above and beyond their usual capabilities.

Vicky replaced the rope of her grappling hook. Present-Allan honed his trident. As they walked, each one of them was wrestling with their own set of thoughts:

Vicky couldn't help but be puzzled about having two Allans in her life. Once this ordeal was over, if the human race still existed, obviously it was the present day Allan she had a relationship with, but since Allan loved her as much as she knew he did, it would be no small matter for this future Allan to see her with himself on a regular basis while he tries to get over the loss of his own future-Vicky and court another woman.

Allan (present day Allan) felt frustrated. Vicky was obviously uneasy about this other Allan, but due to the urgency of the matter there was no way he could take her aside and ask her exactly what her thoughts were. It bothered him that they could not discuss the matter. He also felt sympathy for the other Allan, Knowing how much he loved Vicky and would probably have to continue without her.

Zoë could not forget the conversation they had earlier, despite the promise she made. She could not stand the idea of losing Edward, the idea that Edward himself had had, but she also knew he was right. If he was not prepared to try it they would all be gone anyway. Whatever happened, it seemed she would end up losing him. Once again she tried very hard not to think about it.

Edward was partly afraid of what would become of Zoë once he was gone, that is to say if he managed to save her, and partly paranoid about this new idea about his gland. He understood in essence how the gland worked, and could not see where all the matter would come from that enabled him to erupt with the ferocity of an exploding star. But if this corrupt copy of his was capable of something of that magnitude, he had to be as well. And if this was the case, he was a walking danger to his entire Solar System.

The Allan from the future was trying to piece things together in his mind. scientists had speculated that it was possible to travel through time with a black hole, so that was obviously what had happened to him, but what happened to the Edward, Vicky and Zoë from _his_ time? Were they stuck in different times? Were they trying to avert the black hole themselves? He caught himself thinking about one of them winding up in a future beyond the black hole, after everything had been consumed. He decided not to. As he let his mind wander, He too wondered what would happen to his relationship after this whole thing was over. Then he realized there were gaps in his memory. In _his_ time Edward went out to the archeological site alone, why did he (Allan) know what the balance Mirror looked like? Perhaps he saw them hoisting it up on the television as he sat eating pizza? Perhaps his gaps in memory were a result of time traveling or changing history?

By the time they arrived at Hazard Inc they had all exhausted their minds thinking. A good fight against the artificially created legions and maybe even the odd henchman almost seemed a pleasant idea. As Edward strained a highly compacted cake of sulfur into his hand the others clasped their weapons. He carefully laid it down in front of the steel door to the building, took a few steps back and flicked a pea-sized amount of phosphorus at it. It burst into flames and scattered flaming fragments in all directions. As it burned Edward took out a box of donuts and ate three. He needed to do this, as his blood sugar was the source of his power. By the time it finished burning it had heated the door to a glowing state, and it only took a blast of liquid Nitrogen to cause the door to shatter into bits. They were now inside and had obviously set off an alarm. Biotroops came from all directions, some got electrocuted, some were knocked unconscious with an electrified chain, some were even roped by a grappling hook and slammed into others. Present-day Allan stabbed with his trident, hit with it, spun it defensively, but mostly blasted the beam (a small bonus he got from the radiation off the stones which gave him his aquatic gifts a while back). Future Allan fought in the same way. Edward mainly used his sword, but also the occasional fireball, ice blast or blunt damage with a metal pole from nowhere. He even tried a few plasma shots, but they consumed a lot of energy and he was still perfecting the technique.

When the wave was over Vicky switched to her other form and used her gift to tend to the teams injuries. Once everyone felt better they readied themselves for the next wave: it usually took about twenty minutes to create a fresh batch of biotroops. They waited, but nothing happened.

"You know what that means, don't you?" Future Allan concluded "Something's waiting for us."

At that point they decided to split Future Allan with the rest of the group. That way (should Hazard Inc. not be aware of the extra member) if he was found and captured, the troops would be spread out thinly looking for the other three, and could easily be taken out bit by bit by all four members. However, should the other four be found, there would be no search at all for Allan and he could take them by surprise.

They walked up and down the halls and stairs of Hazard Inc in silence for nearly an hour, eventually they came to a door that was locked.

"If they don't want us in here, this is probably where we should go," said Vicky

Edward surveyed the lock mechanism, near the card slot was a green button. He pressed it. A panel next to the door flipped open revealing a keyboard. "Must be a password mechanism for if an employee loses their card."

"I know the password." Zoë said with confidence.

Edward stood aside and Zoë held her hand up to the keyboard. "What's the password?" asked Edward.

Sparks shot from Zoë's hand to the keyboard until all the lights on the door went out and it swung open weakly. "'Or Else'" she said, smiling innocently.

Once they were through the door they came across Mayhem, a Hazard Inc. henchman with incredible strength and an even more dangerous temper. He was biologically modified to grow stronger as his aggression builds, and psychologically modified to get angry where anyone else would become afraid.

As the four were preparing to fight, something stepped out from behind Mayhem that struck the team with fear. It looked exactly like Mayhem but its colours were inverted. They all knew what that meant.

"They've started using the mirror," the remaining Allan said to Edward out of one side of his mouth.

This Allan was the first to act. He noted the room was filled with suspended animation capsules and he knew these contained water. Unbeknownst to anyone, while they were sizing up the situation, he began stirring up the water in one of them, and by the time the first punch was thrown, he had gotten a steady whirlpool. He threw his trident at the capsule, which shattered the glass. He pulled the swirling ball of water and glass shards closer to him and launched it at the anti-Mayhem. The anti-Mayhem, much unlike the original, remained perfectly calm. Its eyes lit up as it neatly singled out the bits of glass with its mind and directed them back at Allan, who had no control over them. Anti-Mayhem got a splash of water in the face, while the sharp bits of glass caught Allan in the side of the head. Vicky shrieked as he hit the ground. She transformed as quickly as she could and stooped to heal him. Zoë took the opportunity to give the soaked anti-Mayhem an extra-powerful shock and Edward was left to battle the original alone.

Edward quickly fortified his head and chest with metal and readied a ball of phosphor, but instead of throwing it at Mayhem, he threw it a short distance up and stabbed it. As he moved with the best of his agility, all the while swinging his sword with a brightly burning ball on it, Mayhem started to feel a bit disoriented and began to throw some powerful punches at where he thought Edward was. He caught nothing, but was himself caught upside the head with Edward's foot which, Mayhem found, had also been covered with iron. He fell back and struck a wall behind him, then stood up in a mood so foul that he couldn't feel his headache. He charged at Edward who swung his sword, dislodging the fireball which flew straight ahead and connected with Mayhem's face, where it stuck.

Mayhem roared and brushed off the soft, burning substance feverishly. As it burned out on the floor in front of him, he began breathing smoke with rage.

Pain had this way of infuriating Mayhem, and anger had this way of sending blood into Mayhem's face, which was still throbbing with pain from the burn. This made it hurt even more, which made him even angrier. Mayhem's strength grew by the second until he reached his maximum where a single punch could knock Edward out, crack one of his ribs and send him flying. It did.

Zoë had just managed to render Anti-Mayhem unconscious when she saw Mayhem tossing around what looked like a life-sized Edward rag doll. Vicky saw the same thing when Allan was back on his feet. When Mayhem tried to throw what he was certain would be the punch to cool his rage, a chain snagged his wrist. At his level of strength and coordination he was practically ambidextrous, so he tightened his other fist, which was promptly curled around by a rope. Both arms were pulled in opposite directions. He pulled back with ease as Vicky and Zoë lifted off the ground effortlessly and landed in front of him on either side of Edward. Mayhem, too, got a splash in the face. The cool water made his face feel a bit better, which was bad news for him. Vicky and Zoë stood up and ran in opposite directions, pulling Mayhem's arms apart again. This time pulling them back together was a bit more of a strain, and it did not help when part way through Vicky suddenly healed his injuries. He knew she only did this to remove his anger, and this angered him, but he could not get himself anywhere near the level of rage he had when his face stung him like a mask of molten metal. Another splash of water made him shut his eyes, and while they were closed he became aware of a light beyond his eyelids as if his face were turned toward the sun. He was also aware that he was being struck by something like long drawn-out lightning. Zoë sent a gush of sparks through him that lit up the entire room, and despite his rage building anew he was helpless as his powerful muscles contorted involuntarily. Eventually his anger got so great that it fizzled out and vanished as he fell to the floor and lay there twitching. The fight was over. The anti-Mayhem disappeared with something that looked like an indigo flame, and there was nothing left of it.

After being healed, Edward stood up and straightened his spectacles. One of the lenses was cracked.

"Did you notice?" Allan said at length. "Both Mayhems fought for the same side."

"If they can reprogram a mind that powerful, who _knows_ what they could bring about with that mirror thing?" Vicky added.

"There's only one simple solution," Zoë concluded, "We have to get that mirror, and put it somewhere no-one will ever find it again."

"I for one have certainly seen enough doppelgangers for one day," Edward remarked.

"But did you see how the new Mayhem vanished when we beat them both? Perhaps getting rid of the other Edward could be that simple, too."

"That may be, Allan, But you heard how difficult it is to land even a single hit on that copy-me. It can absorb anything we throw at it."

"Why bother throwing stuff at it? Why don't we just get in close and attack it with a weapon?"

"Even worse. Would you like to see that thing eliminate your trident and maybe a piece of your arm? It took a lot out of me to make the diamond for my sword's blade when tungsten proved not strong enough and I'm in no mood to do it again."

Edward's blade was, in fact, a long, razor-sharp diamond, arguably one of the most valuable things on the planet, but if insane riches were that important to the group he could sweat gold if he felt like it. As far as his weapon was concerned, he needed the blade strong and sharp, and the hardest substance in the world fit the need perfectly.

After Zoë entered her special password, they passed through the door the two Mayhems had guarded.

The next room was completely black. Leather Jack's voice boomed from a giant speaker system hidden somewhere in the darkness.

"So good of you all to come. I can't tell you how touched I am to see you all here, realizing that you've finally lost and willing to surrender yourselves to me. Still, that business with Mayhem was totally unnecessary. He's a reasonable fellow. He would have been more than happy to escort you in."

"You know how it goes, Jack," Edward shouted at seemingly just a large voice "We let ourselves in. That's how it is, and that's how it will be until the day we tear this place to shreds"

Allan tightened his grip on his trident.

"Always going for the violent option," roared the voice, "why do you always choose to make your lives so difficult? We're all civilized people here." The lights came on. "Surely we can all come to some sort of agreement."

With everything brightly visible, our heroes could see the room they were in was gigantic. It needed to be, as it contained a colossal vehicle. It looked like a modified construction vehicle, but streamlined. It had what looked like two immovable pincers at the front with a cannon of some kind between them. It rolled on massive wheels and had a thick pipe of sorts that lead out of the ceiling and fed into to a tank it carried on top. Up high visible through a dome of glass or Perspex was its creator, Professor Tech, at its controls.

Professor Tech was a scientist with a controversial ethics system. He shared in the megalomania that kept Hazard inc. going and had money and knowledge unmatched by many. He was also a top-class engineer and singlehandedly built the machines that gave Hazard Inc. its power. An accident with acid left his face disfigured and his brain visible, and he wore a long white coat with an oversized collar that veiled his face in darkness so all that could be seen were his glowing green eyes and his oversized pulsating brain above his head like a sick pink cloud. His sleeves extended past his hands but his fingernails were dangerously overgrown and could be seen sticking out beyond them.

Far above the machine Leather Jack sat in a glass observation deck behind a desk with a microphone. The balance mirror was next to him, deactivated. "Still," he continued, "I appreciate you all showing up to try out my new toy. I'm certain the soldiers that come out of it will serve me well."

"Haven't you tried the 'evil copy' bit already?" Vicky half-stated cynically, but got no answer.

Leather Jack had once before obtained DNA of each of the four heroes and created genetic copies of them, complete with special abilities. He modified them to make them evil, but still could not control them. They broke out of the Hazard Inc facility and added themselves to the ensemble of villains the team is forced to face.

The vehicle roared into life. The heroes charged at it but were soon pushed back by a powerful blast of water. "You're all soaked now," Leather Jack gloated into the microphone. "Edward, I would tell your Ms Wright to think carefully about using her electricity. That water is much more saline than the water she boiled Mayhem in."

"Great!" Allan said, coming to his feet enthusiastically, "Then it's just my forte!" he readied his mind for the second blast.

The next blast of water was aimed straight at Allan, and while he was able to resist it to some extent, it was still very powerful and knocked him off his feet again. The pincers on the contraption shot sparks at each other. They were electric poles. They had to run, dive and roll around on the floor to avoid being zapped and every blast of water Allan tried in vain to resist with his gift. They needed to think of a new strategy, and fast.

Zoë looked up and saw a steel grating fly from one of the walls. She followed it with her eyes until it hit the ground and was followed by Future-Allan, who slowly rose to his feet and drew his trident. "Miss anything important?" he asked with a grin.

The next stream of water charged at both Allans, who each raised a hand in front of his face and gathered the stream up in a gigantic ball. One Allan commanded the left half, and the other commanded the right. The ball hovered above their heads for a while, and was then sent back at the machine, which was scooped off its wheels, flipped over and brought down with a force. It suffered no notable damage, but could not get upright. It was now using its water cannon to propel itself along the floor uncontrollably, but dangerously.

"Let's clean up!" Edward decided. He jumped at the nearly helpless machine, clambered up toward its underside, and grabbed one of its large, desperately spinning wheels. It flung him high into the air, toward the point where the duct that fed into the machine looked weakest, the place where it connected to the ceiling. He slashed at it powerfully and it came off. Water poured into the room.

Leather Jack gave an evil smile and threw a switch on the desk in front of him. When he did, the entire room started to seal itself. Every door, duct and drain closed itself tightly and did not allow another drop out. The five heroes stood and watched as the room began to fill with water. Meanwhile the once nearly helpless vehicle dethatched its tank, retracted its wheels and sprouted previously concealed fins and propellers.

Present-day Allan made an urgent appeal: "Edward! When the room gets too flooded, keep the girls safe. The other Allan and I will take it from here."

As the room filled up beyond the vehicle, its propellers came to life and lifted it off the ground. It now pumped powerful currents from its cannon and spat sparks angrily from its pincers.

Vicky and Zoë huddled together with Edward, who sealed the three of them in a metal capsule which he kept well stocked with oxygen. He left small pores in it to keep the pressure from getting too great and did what he could to ensure no water got in. Eventually the room was flooded to the ceiling.

To say Allan was a good swimmer was an understatement. He always enjoyed swimming, and it was while he went snorkeling when he noticed a strange blue glow at the bottom of a reef. He filled his lungs and plunged into what otherwise would have been the darkness of marine depth. As he swam down he noticed that the glow came from deeper under the surface than it originally seemed. Mesmerized, he continued his descent.

He reached a strangely smooth face of rock, and it was this face of rock that was causing the glow. He looked at it in astonishment as his lungs filled with carbon dioxide. So great was his feeling of wonder that he barely noticed how he no longer felt the pressure from the deep water around him. By the time he realized he needed breath it was much too urgent for him to make it to the surface. Nonetheless, he desperately kicked and paddled his way to the surface as his vision began to fade. Five feet below the surface he could no longer hold on, and salty water flushed down his airway, or, as he now discovered, his waterway. He could inhale the stinging salty water of the ocean and survive, and to top it all off it no longer stung him.

Since gaining his power to breathe under water he surprisingly quickly learned to swim as if he belonged there. He was at his most powerful under water and now there were two of him. Each Allan blasted an electric pincer with a trident, leaving the monster submarine unable to use them. The mechanism for the water cannon however was located too deep inside and they were unable to harm it in the same way. Both Allans darted for the bubble that contained the driver and struck at it with their tridents. It suffered no damage, still. One of them aimed a blast, but it bounced off and nearly hit the other. There was obviously some carefully crafted means to deflect light away from the cockpit. Leather Jack was getting to know his opponents too well. The next moment the vehicle began to spin and as it did, it stirred the water around it sending the two amphibians swirling out of control. Each composed himself and brought the water around him to a standstill. They swam toward each other and created a massive whirlpool of their own. The mech was caught in it and hurled toward a wall, but redirected itself with a blast from its cannon and swung in an arch, knocking one of the Allans - the future Allan - unconscious. He sank to the bottom, but safely so as the water could not kill him.

Present-day Allan remained standing, so to speak, and clung to the back of the vessel as it darted around viciously. He used his hands to slowly but surely climb against the water currents pushing him back and made his way to one of the fins. He blasted it with his trident, which caused it to break off and send the vessel twisting erratically through the water. Allan had a harder time holding on as he made his way to the other fin. Once he did he destroyed it, too. Tech could no longer steer. The grotesque submarine thrashed wildly, crashing into the walls.

The noise, which was even loud under water, woke up future Allan. He opened his eyes and blinked for focus. Lying in front of him was the grating he kicked out earlier. He got an Idea and pushed the back of his trident through one of the holes.

Leather Jack was sitting happily at his desk. So far he had been enjoying the show. He directed his attention away from one of the Allans when he was knocked out and sat waiting to see how Tech would take care of the other. Something was coming at the glass. It looked like a trident stuck through a grating of some sort. The impact of the grating chipped the glass. The mighty water on the other side of it caused it to crack. As it did, water started to gush in. Panic overcame Jack and he pressed a switch on the controls in front of him and ran out.

All the places that had sealed themselves earlier opened up, and the water in the room started to run out. Once the surface had lowered a good amount the Allans both swam to the bottom. They searched the floor for a fairly large metal object that was making thousands of small bubbles. When they found it they lifted it up and swam to the surface. They lodged it in the duct the water was pouring in from, which stopped most of the flow. Right before the water had gone too low one of them tapped at the object three times. A spark came out which turned into Zoë holding on to both Edward and Vicky.

"You guys okay?" present-day Allan asked?

"Fine," Edward panted. The capsule kept them relatively safe, but it was still an uncomfortable experience for both muscle and lung.

Vicky went into her other form and flew Edward back up to the blocked pipe, which was high above their heads now, Edward then froze what little water still trickled through and covered the ice with metal to seal the hole properly.

Not much longer afterwards the five had their feet on the ground again. Vicky remembered seeing the Balance Mirror up in the area where Leather Jack was. She flew up and yes, he had left it there. She brought it down again. The two Allans high-fived each other and Edward, then hugged Vicky. Edward hugged Zoë. They had recovered the balance mirror.

An alarm went off that vibrated the air, followed by the familiar thumping of several feet on the tiles that covered all the floors of the building. The heroes looked at each other and drew their weapons.

The sun was setting when the heroes were back at the excavation site where the mirror had been hoisted out earlier that day. It was now peaceful and deserted save the head of the archeologists that visited the site earlier, with whom they had arranged to meet there. The hole gaped at the sky in silence while the extra Allan hid in it so as not to cause alarm.

"On behalf of all of us, I wish to thank you for returning this priceless piece of historic wonder to us." the archeologist said, almost glowing with gratitude. "If there's any way we can ever repay the favour, just name it."

"There is something," Edward ventured "This object is extremely dangerous. If you do not wish to destroy it, keep it somewhere safe as far away from fire as possible and the fewer the people who know where it is, the better."

"Done," the Archeologist replied. "In fact, I'll do you one better. We will change the place it is kept every set amount of time, and only a select group of people will know when and where. Even so it shall be heavily guarded by reliable men sworn to secrecy."

"That will do," Said Edward "And that is our sole request to you."

"I thank you again." The man said and walked off with the mirror. Vicky transformed and flew down the hole. A few seconds later she flew back out carrying the Allan that was left out of the conversation.

"How did it go?" He asked.

"I'd say it went well" Edward answered. "We can accept the mirror's safety for the next while at least."

Back home the team had a quick dinner and it did not take a long discussion to confirm unanimously that they would all go to sleep and begin searching for the first and last remaining trace of the mirror on the next day. They made a bed for future-Allan on one of the couches. He passed into sleep the moment his head touched it.

"Poor thing," Vicky Said, "he's been up since tomorrow."

"Looks like tomorrow will be quite the day then." Zoë deduced.

Edward and Zoë, too, left for well deserved rest. Allan and Vicky stayed behind for a moment.

"So Vicky," Allan said after a while "I've been meaning to ask you: Now that there are two of me, what will happen... you know... with us?"

"I've been thinking about that, too."

"And?"

"I'd rather not. Let's discuss it once we see how this whole thing works out."

The next day the five were awake early and after breakfast sat discussing the plan for the day.

"All right, Allan, tell us to the best of your ability how things happened on your timeline?"

"We got up, then we went looking for the creature that came out of the mirror."

"Did you find it?"

"Yes, Twice. The first time it was in the park. We fought it for a while but we couldn't even scratch it. It was like trying to make a hole in soup. Eventually it ran off. We found it again later on a small grassy hill, and that's where it made the black hole. The next thing I remember I fell to the ground and everyone was gone, that was when I realized I had traveled back in time."

"Right, then the park is the first place we'll look. Next we'll need a battle plan."

"What if we surrounded it? That way, while one of us distracts it someone else could get a hit."

"That might work, Vicky. Technically I can make matter anywhere I have skin, but I prefer using my hands because it's more convenient. He appears to do the same. He only has two hands and there are five of us. Maybe if we tried it that way we could do it."

"There's one thing, though, remember how the other Mayhem only vanished when we knocked out the original? We might have to do the same to Edward." Allan added.

"I, too, have come to realize that. So when the time comes, whoever's closest to me should knock me out as quickly as they can. It may be the only way."

The others sat for a moment, each wondering: If it was I who had to do it, could I bring myself as far as to knock him out, even if I knew it was for all of our benefit?

Once they arrived at the park they decided to split up. Vicky would take to the air and survey the situation from the skies. The other four would each search a quarter of the park. If either of the ground-dwellers found the creature first, they would fire a trident beam, bolt of plasma or streak of electricity past Vicky to get her attention. Vicky would then fire a beam near the other three and hover above the person who found it so the others would know where to go. If Vicky saw it from above before anyone else, she would simply send out a beam to each of them and hover above it so the others could get together around it.

Right before they split up, Edward reminded them "we get this shot and one other, but time won't be on our side for the second one, so we'd best do it at the first attempt."

Vicky too had a beam. One she could fire from her hands, but only in her mystical form and only downward. It had the effect of temporarily adding inertia and removing energy, so she could bring things to a standstill. She mostly used it to ground airborne adversaries. She gained it along with all the other special abilities she has in her mystical form, when she went hiking with Allan during a remote island getaway. He slid down some loose stones beyond her capability to assist and they agreed to regroup again half way round the mountain where Vicky's trail met with Allan's. After they had parted, a strange tribe of cave people caught Vicky and dragged her into their domain. Inside they tied her to a stalagmite and began to perform a mysterious ritual that was to transform her into what their language called a "Healing Goddess", so she could aid their soldiers when they returned from battle. Allan found it strange that Vicky was not already waiting for him at the place they agreed to meet, so he retraced her trail to see if she was alright.

Allan found Vicky's necklace, which she smartly removed and dropped by the cave's entrance. Driven by love, Allan charged in and shot with his trident at a large, clear crystal sticking out of the ground. The ray split into many lesser harsh rays which knocked out the whole tribe at once. Vicky had already shifted into a being with white butterfly-like wings, blonde hair and a feather-light white dress, but the ritual had not been completed, so she was not stuck in this form, but instead, could alter forms at will.

Zoë was the first to find the Anti-Edward. As they discussed she sent a jolt past Vicky and observed a pillar of light flash from Vicky downward, and again and again, and then saw her fly closer. She turned to face the creature, which was looking as though it was about to kill for food and enjoy doing so. To see the face of someone she loved stare at her in that way in such a strange colour disturbed her deeply. She gathered her wits and focused. She tried to zap him, but he extended a hand and the blast vanished in a purple cloud. She tried it again and once again, both times getting the same results.

One of the Allans was the first to join them. He fired a steady ray and held it. The creature consumed the ray as if it were nothing. The other Allan showed up and fired one too. The creature was now using both hands to keep beams at bay. Edward showed up and started to form a small blade between his palms. The moment the creature saw him - and before it could react - a yellow light caught it from above that slowed its mind and froze all its muscles for a moment. The heroes were now in a large, rough pyramid formation with the creature at its centre.

By the time the creature had control of its muscles Edward had already landed the blade in its shoulder. It appeared to scream but no sound came out. Zoë launched another streak of electricity that all gathered on the blade before it entered the creature. The creature shook with its eyes shut tightly. After a while it collapsed on the ground and Zoë stopped.

"I'm ready!" Edward shouted "Do it!"

Being as fast as she was, Zoë was the first to Edward. He handed her his sword, still sheathed. "Hit me with it!" he braced himself.

She gripped it in both hands and raised it above her head. She started shaking "I can't," she said weakly.

"Just do it," he insisted. "It's okay."

"Just hit him, Zoë!" Allan shouted from where he was standing.

"You can do it!" Vicky added.

"I can't!" Zoë argued. Edward's sword fell to the ground.

"Shock me then." Edward said urgently "I'll be fine. Vicky can heal me"

She extended a hand and looked away. A jolt came out that hit Edward, but it wasn't enough. Another one came out. It missed. Edward walked up to Zoë and took her hand. She turned her head back to face him.

"You can do this." he said softly

"I can't!" she protested.

"It's okay," he repeated, "just hold my hand and give it everything you've got."

Looking Edward square in the eyes she began. She sent a few broken jolts through his arm, slowly increasing the power. Edward fought to keep the gentle expression on his face and wished Zoë would look away. Zoë could see the pain in Edwards eyes and she, too, wished she could look away. She tried as hard as she could but she was unable to do him any real harm. Both Allans and Vicky too could not stand the sight of what was happening. Eventually it became too much for one of them. He ran up to the pair and hit Edward with the wide side of his trident as hard as he could. Zoë screamed and Edward finally collapsed on the ground.

The four that were left standing turned to look at the reflection, but it was already coming to its feet. The moment it saw them staring it shouted something that made no sound and shrouded its whole body in a purple fog. It turned and ran off as a desperate barrage of light from the team vanished into it.

They could not chase it. They had to return to Edward. Stooping next to him Zoë took his hand as Vicky healed him. He opened his eyes and looked at Zoë. He then looked at the Allan that hit him, who shook his head.

"Thanks anyway," he said

They walked home in silence. Zoë felt terrible.

Edward stepped into Zoë's room. She was sitting on her bed with her head down and her back to the door. When Edward sat down next to her she didn't look up.

"I couldn't do it," She said bitterly

"It's okay," he said again, "I'm glad you couldn't." he added "Now I can buy a rolling pin and not be afraid of it if I ever worked late."

Zoë didn't laugh.

"Look at me," he said after a while. She looked up and faced him. He stared at her for a while and then said gently "such a pretty face." it made her blush. "If it came to me, and I had to hit you, I couldn't do it either. I mean how could I bring harm to something so perfect?"

Edward knew no human was truly perfect, he felt that Zoë was perfect for him and that was all the perfection he needed. It was with this in mind that he often liked to refer to her as such.

"Basically, I'm crazy about you," he continued "I couldn't hurt you even if I _had_ to. And if I did, I'd _hate_ myself for it."

There was a pause.

"You did the same thing I would do." He said eventually, "Which means you _feel_ the same way I do. How could I be anything other than happy about that?"

It was rhetorical, but Zoë answered: "We could have beaten that thing. Everything could have been okay. But I couldn't do it, now the Black hole is going to happen and you're going to try and explode and it's all my fault."

Edward wiped the tears off Zoë's cheek. "You can't say that. Allan could have hit me, Vicky could have hit me, Future Allan could have hit me. They didn't even try until you did more than you could. If I listened to Allan in the first place that thing would never even have shown up. Anyone of us can take the blame and with good reason. We all make mistakes. It's human. And it's why there are problems in the world. But sometimes if we work together, we can help each other clean up a bit, and we can save what we can while we still can."

"I don't want you to blow yourself up."

"And I promise I won't do it if I don't have to."

Future Allan lead the team to the place where their last chance was. It was a small, seemingly ordinary hill in no significant region of town. On top of it stood the negative image of Vicky's close friend, the love of Zoë's life, and Allan's brother, but his eyes were the eyes of something else. Something unnatural that did not belong in this world. The image of Edward spoke, but again nothing could be heard. Lightning struck and a violent wind began to hiss about them. The storm broke out at the same time as the fight.

The Edward Copy had bound his shoulder after having dissolved the blade in it. His wound had mostly healed, but a stain of light green was still visible on the bandage. The invert-copy Edward had its own invert-copy sword. Its blade was pure black in colour and struck Edward's with a deep ring. His agility was inferior to Edward's, but Edward could not risk attacking for fear of a well placed antimatter cloud consuming his sword. He could only use his sword to parry the attacks from his mirror image. Zoë extended a hand and attracted the next bolt of lightning. As it drew close to her it curved right past her hand. She amplified it and sent it straight at the creature. The creature managed to consume some of it, but he had not made a big enough cloud and suffered a shock that threw him to the ground. Edward produced a tungsten javelin and passed it to Allan, who felt better throwing a temporary weapon than his trident at a creature that could make it vanish. Anti-Edward rolled on the ground, dodging the spear before springing to his feet. He covered his sword with a cloud of antimatter and waved it violently as he charged at them.

"What is that sword made of," Allan wondered aloud "if it's not even affected by antimatter?"

"Whatever it takes" Edward said horrified, "it wasn't made by science."

There was no defense for an antimatter sword. The heroes scattered.

"We've got to eliminate the cloud around the sword!" Edward shouted above the storm "Throw anything you can!"

They threw rocks, blasted with lightning and tridents, Edward even made blocks of lead. As they kept their distance, relentlessly pelting the sword with anything they could find, slowly but surely the cloud around the sword began to vanish. Once it did, Vicky jumped into the air, did the fastest transformation of her life and aimed a beam that covered the sword and the hand that held it. Edward threw another blade that hit it in the wrist. The sword flew and pegged into the ground.

"Now's our chance!" Shouted Allan "Give it everything you've got!" Both Allans blasted, Zoë shot lightning, Edward launched plasma, Vicky did her best to keep the creature still. The moment was chaotic to say the least. Hope bloomed in all of them, as they considered themselves getting closer to victory. Their hearts soon sank as they noticed the image of Edward on the receiving end of their attack stand totally unaffected. Everything they threw at it seemed to thin out, curve toward its eyes and vanish there. As they stopped attacking they noticed that the creature was wearing a foreboding expression. Its smile was wide like that of Edward at his friendliest, but the eyes spoke of deviousness and omen and had become pitch black. They seemed to darken the area around them.

Future Allan was next to speak: "This is it!" he shouted, "It's happening!"

The darkness in the creature's eyes spread across its face and down its body, until it looked like a silhouette. As the team became aware of a slight pull, the blackness spread further until it became an expanding ball. Light objects like sand and loose grass fell helplessly into the growing darkness. The surrounding air was pulled in too, causing a wind barely noticeable above the storm at first, but it grew stronger and louder until the storm itself was drowned out. The team tried to run, but they had not gone far until they were forced to grab hold of objects rooted in the ground. Edward grabbed a sign at a bus stop, Zoë the bus stop's bench. The Allans grabbed a tree and Vicky managed to hang on to the bars in the window of a building.

As the chaos grew more and more intense the friends began to struggle to hear each other above the noise and over the distances between them. The sign was the first to give in. It bent toward the growing black hole and snapped off. Edward thrashed his arms as he tumbled toward it and was then caught by Zoë, who now clung to her standing object with her legs and by altering magnetism. She held on as tightly as she could and Edward did the same. Then the tree revealed itself to be the nest of some ants. Smaller bits of greenery had already fed the creature in all his new found glory, but now it was the weakened tree's turn. It tore diagonally and crumbled as both Allans thrashed wildly while they plunged into the giant ball of doom, which by now loomed as large as a three storey building.

Witnessing this stirred something in Edward and as he held on to Zoë he noticed a strange light illuminating her face. She stared back at him and gaped as his eyes turned white and gave off a blinding light.

"I can do it!"

"What?!"

"The supernova! I can make it happen! Let me into the black hole so I can stop it!"

"This is crazy!"

"I know, but it's our only chance! Let me do it!"

"I can't!" Zoë said again.

The bars Vicky held on to broke off from the building and she, too, plummeted in.

"You have to! It's the only way we can save anything!"

"I couldn't even knock you out! Now you're asking me to drop you into a black hole so you can blow yourself up!"

"I know! I promised you I wouldn't do it if I didn't have to, but now I do! Please! You have to be strong for everyone's sake! That's what we do, remember?"

Zoë thought of how difficult it was to strike Edward, how hard she tried to build up enough power to zap him unconscious, and then the regret she felt when she failed to do it. She remembered what Edward said about blame and making up for mistakes made.

"You have to let me go!" Edward insisted. "This thing will not die down on its own! It will just get bigger and consume everything until nothing is left! Either I go, or everything goes _including_ me!"

They looked at each other for a moment in what passed at that time for silence. He pulled himself closer until his mouth met her ear and spoke a bit more softly. "Whatever happens, I love you." He let himself move a bit further away and kissed her, then they both let go of each other's hands.

"I love you, too!" Zoë Shouted as Edward plunged into the blackness.

As the blackness did with his reflection, the light spread to Edward's face and then to his body. He became an expanding ball of light as he was consumed by darkness. The light and the darkness thinned out until the ball was perfectly grey, and it began to shrink. As it did the winds died down and the sky turned clear. The ball of grey shrunk until at first glance there was nothing left of it. Zoë stepped closer and saw a tiny grey dot floating in the air above the middle of a large, silent crater. The storm was gone, the wind was gone, bits of the road and buildings were gone, the hill was gone, and her friends were gone. The sun now shone brightly. The dot hovered there for a moment and then began to expand again, slowly at first. Zoë turned and ran: Logic predicted what was going to happen next.

As the dot expanded it became lighter and brighter until it turned to a glowing white ball, blasting out matter and growing in size and ferocity. It grew until it became as intense as the black hole had been at its worst, just before it consumed Edward. It blew out sand and clouds, the pieces of tree that had been torn off, chunks of tar and rubble, bits of grass and other plants, and mostly confusion. Eventually the noise became unbearable again and stopped after a while.

Zoë stood up and walked to the centre of where everything happened. There she saw Edward, passed out. She ran up to him and knelt down by his shoulder, then lifted his head and rested it on her lap. His eyes opened slowly and he looked around.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"I feel great," he said slowly and hoarsely, "we did it." He sat up.

Zoë was still kneeling behind him and now put her arms around him. There was movement in the rubble and Vicky emerged. She ran up to the pair.

"I'm glad to see you're alright. Where's Allan?"

"I'm over here!" Allan pushed a slab of rubble off himself and came to his feet.

"Which one are you?" Edward urged him. Present or future?

"Future. I'm the one who came back and quite honestly I can't tell you how relieved I am."

"Where's our Allan then? I don't see him anywhere." Vicky said at length.

Allan stood in thought for a moment and eventually said "I get it now. He's gone back to stop all this from happening!"

"How can you be so sure?" Vicky asked.

"Have you forgotten? I _am_ him. This is how it happened, but I didn't stay to see the end. Now I have."

Allan remembered falling into the black hole the second time. How he thrashed his arms and legs, and then felt his heel hit something before looking down - or what passed for down at the time - to see the other Allan clutching the back of his head. He rubbed the back of his own head and sure enough, he too had a bump there. It all made sense now.

"This is how it all happened. My memory is a bit fuzzy but I'm sure of it."

"So that's it. He's gone," Vicky began blankly; "he's fallen into a black hole and is doomed to spending the rest of his life one day behind-" she stopped and looked over at Allan.

"See? I'm okay," he said comically. She felt a bit silly but relieved, and kissed him.

On the way home, Edward couldn't help but feel a degree of sympathy for the image of himself he had just defeated. He never wished to come into existence, and evil as though he was, his desire to destroy the world was just a reflection of Edward's desire to protect it. Edward remembered how the creature spoke without making any sound. Was he speaking in a sort of negative frequency that beings from this world did not hear? What was he saying? What language was he speaking? Edward thought of the conviction with which he himself fought for what he believed in. Could the copy have felt the same? Everything that made him a villain, everything that made him a threat, everything that made him what he was, was a negative reflection of Edward. Edward's fault, in a twisted way. Nonetheless, this all went to prove that the two beings were never meant to coexist. After all, Edward tried to assure himself, I was here first, and then he felt guilty for mentally wording it in that way. In the back of his mind Edward hoped if these miscreants went anywhere after they were defeated, they at least felt a bit better there than they did in the world where they did not belong -or at the very least felt nothing at all - assuming they felt anything to begin with.

As it turned out, Allan lived through the entire episode twice, suffering a sharp blow to the back of the head after the first round. The blow wiped some of the memories he had, mostly the dealings he had with himself, and the idea he had for a solution. Fortunately it left all the memories of the creature and what the creature did. In a way, he mainly recalled the events as they would have been had he not met his future self, had he not been told ahead of time what would happen. This made the mission more dangerous, but worked out for the best: had the creature not been able to create the black hole, one of the Allans could not have been sent back twenty-eight hours, and they would have been stuck with an extra, which, as stated earlier, would have made things very complicated.

It worked out for Edward, too: Having come face-to-face with a black hole he learned how to create a supernova, and although he still did not understand the logic behind it and why it left him unharmed, he knew exactly how to do it. But more importantly, he knew exactly how _not_ to do it. He was no longer a threat to the world, and in the unlikely event of Anti-Edward ever being recreated he knew exactly how to stop the antimatter black hole.

Vicky was relieved, in one sense because the planet had not been sucked into a vortex, in another because events transpired in such a way that the dreaded talk with Allan about having two of him around was reduced to a few short sentences. Truth be told, she did not even know what she would say, had it worked out otherwise, and neither did Allan. Now things were back to normal (Barring the minor detail that the relative age difference between her and her Allan had increased by a bit more than a day) and as these suicide missions usually made it, they loved each other more than ever.

Zoë had forgiven herself (In fact, she was almost proud of it) for hesitating each time the responsibility fell to her to bring Edward to harm. In doing so, she managed to help bring about the best possible ending to a string of mishaps that could have ended in many ugly ways. She was also satisfied that the love she felt for Edward was mutual (She never doubted this, but now she knew it more than ever), and the fact that she had been able to allow Edward to plummet into a black hole and then explode like a dying star without even shedding a tear due to her trust, told her not that she felt less for Edward than she did before, but that she was much stronger than she had previously thought.

They were a day overdue for a pizza-night (In Allan's case, two days). As they ate they recounted their experiences of the last adventure and became more aware of what a team they made. Allan had the unforgettable experience of fighting alongside himself, which further extended his adaptive capability of teamwork, and Edward the introspective experience of fighting _against_ himself, which refreshed his regard for humanity, but hampered none of his convictions. It was one of their craziest adventures yet, but by far not their last.


	2. Chapter 2

Antarctica is a cold place.

Anyone who has anything important to do there had better do it quickly, all the (preferably short) while staying active so as to avoid hypothermia. Thinking is therefore a luxury. Our four heroes, Allan and Edward Kidman and their girlfriends Zoë Wright and Victoria Honeywell, had two advantages, however. Not only have they been in the world-saving business for so long that they could get by on limited amounts of thinking, but also, and more importantly, they were not Anyone. Having what can most accurately be called superpowers, each had their own way to lessen the effects of the unimaginable cold, though it needed different degrees of effort.

Being hydrokinetic, Allan could pull the ice particles apart so intensely that they would turn to steam, and then let it condense on his skin, removing it again before it cooled and froze. Vicky, whose powers were more or less light based, surrounded herself with a warm glow. Zoë had it easiest: a steady flow of self-generated electricity through her conductive body in effect turned her into a walking heating element. As for Edward, very, _very_ small amounts of phosphorous secreted onto his skin reacted with the air, but not so hotly as to cause any flames. Although these mechanisms helped with survival, which was exceedingly important, it did not exactly change the fact that Antarctica is a horribly, bitterly cold place.

Now, the question of what our supers are doing on the South Pole needs to be answered, and the answer is quite simply this: They are saving the world. Leather Jack, the jacket-clad Mastermind of the hazardously ambitious organization Hazard Inc., was trying to execute another elaborate plot against the blue planet we all call home.

The battle was short. It needed to be since, as mentioned, this was Antarctica. A bullet from Jack's handgun brought Allan down, but only temporarily because he had a healer by his side. The party acted fast: Zoë curled an immediately electrified chain around the newly exposed wrist while Edward was preparing a phosphorous ball. He flung it down on the floor in front of Jack, and at the same time Zoë was tugging him toward it, and more importantly the slippery melting puddle around it. This brought him down quickly. Allan, who was back on his feet by now, psychokinetically raised up a portion of this icy puddle into a ball about twice the size of his fist, and sped it toward their adversary. It froze rock-solid again just before it shattered on his forehead.

"Give up, Jack!" it came from a triumphant Edward. In fact, they were all looking quite triumphant, indeed. "You've lost this one!"

"Oh, I would hardly say that," The Leader of Hazard Inc. was sounding quite cool in the evident face of defeat, this effect helped by the dark glasses he wore day and night. "Why do you think I came to this frozen wasteland in the first place? I have hidden a surprise, a nasty little surprise, in this icy cavern that can turn the greater part of this continent into a slushie." Anyone who heard the excited shivers in the man's voice would bet their most valued possession that he was positively psychotic. "In about two minutes from now an uninvited high tide will start to spread from Antarctica, and it won't stop until the people who up until then thought they were living inland can take a casual backstroke to work every morning." Of course, the question _did_ come up in the minds of all four onlookers, but they had long before come to terms with the fact that Leather Jack was far beyond 'why' on the road leading away from reason.

Leather Jack had seen to it that he would be nearest to the mouth of the cave by the end of the fight. He took a few steps backward and a rope ladder descended which he promptly grabbed hold of, and he was quickly airlifted away aboard the company blimp. The four were left with a dilemma, namely that unless they could find and defuse an extremely potent Hazard Inc. Detonation Device, they will have failed horribly in their purpose for coming to Antarctica in the first place.

It was Allan who had the idea. Ideas of this nature most often came to the ones whom it did not necessitate to, as they say, 'take one for the team'. "Hazard Inc.'s bombs are the old school mechanical kind. If we were to freeze it, say, with liquid nitrogen, it would buy us as much time as we could possibly want!"

"That's true," replied Edward, "but _I_ can't exactly freeze this bomb if I don't know where it is, can I?"

"Um, no… well, yes…" Edward felt a new kind of chill expanding from his chest as he realized Allan was finding something very difficult to say. "Maybe… er… if you could freeze the entire cavern, you know, from the inside… um… I could even make it easier by pushing in some water from the outside, and Vicky and I can protect your cells, you know, against damage from the ice…"

In Allan's defense, if he had given this idea any thought at all he would never have suggested it in the first place, but let us remind ourselves that thinking was a luxury in this situation. Edward, of course, found this idea totally absurd, but what was especially terrifying was that there were no other options at hand. Despite the seriousness of the situation, the Kidman twins' conversation did not lose its' lighthearted nature.

"You want me to _freeze myself_ in this cave?!"

"We'll come back for you as soon as we find the bomb!"

"Is that a fact?"

Allan turned to his significant other. "Vicky, Love, hand me that necklace of yours, will you please?"

Vicky had a thin golden chain around her neck with a pendant in the shape of an eight-pointed star. The shiny charm caught the eye quite easily. The area where it hung, even more so. She handed it over, silenced partly by curiosity at what Allan was planning that could possibly involve his first gift to her, and partly by the cold.

Allan gave the necklace to Edward. "See? Now we'll _have_ to come back for you!"

"Very funny."

The next moment Edward was standing more or less in the middle of the cavern, with his feet apart and his face in a determined expression, like someone who is about to do something very heroic at a great cost to himself. "I've sent a signal to Nate Beta-Unit to come and help out with the bomb."

Nate Beta-Unit was a highly sophisticated robot and an invaluable ally. Edward (having some background in robotics, albeit a basic one) was the one who had found and repaired him nearly a year ago. Nate had first belonged to The System, a group consisting of a robotic army run by the twisted cyborg Nathan Mechse that rivals, if not exceeds, the threat posed to humanity by Hazard Inc.. While Hazard Inc. merely aimed to conquer the world, enslaving all of its people, Mechse and the system aspired to annihilate all humans; whether or not planet earth was still in one piece, or even existed, once this goal had been achieved was a minor detail. It was when Beta-Unit, then second in command, had somehow developed a sense of morality that he began to question his leader's aspirations and was subsequently destroyed and discarded.

As these things go, the rest is history.

Zoë hated the idea of trapping Edward in the ice, but she could at least take comfort in the fact that this was for the greater good. Indeed, she had subjected him to worse for the sake of their heroic duty and was stronger for it.

The frigid water that was now rushing toward Edward as he clutched at the valued item of jewelry was the last image he would see for quite some time.

Then, for an eternity, and for an instant, the world around Edward Kidman turned pale blue.

 _ **Edward… Wake up…**_

The words were, at first, so faint that Edward mistook them for his own, unclearly formed thoughts. Edward wondered how many hours had passed since he agreed to freeze himself.

"… _Wake up. You have to wake up!"_

It dawned on Edward that they could in fact not be his own thoughts, on account of the voice that said them sounding somewhat older than he was. At the same time the blueness-turned-blackness faded into an image that, for reasons unknown to Edward himself caused him some alarm, despite it being blurred. Also, oddly enough, the first thoughts that drifted into his mind were of late nights, early mornings and the bathroom. What Edward was actually seeing was something he could not connect with any of these thoughts on a conscious level, which was a blurred face.

"Wake up, Edward! Quickly! Wake up!"

As his eyes adjusted he found elements of the face becoming apparent which were brown hair just under shoulder length and a pair of oval spectacles in front of greenish brown eyes. This person looked (and it felt such a cliché to even be thinking it) strange yet familiar. "I don't know how much time we have," he said

Two of Edward's neurons struck each other and went _Clang_ , complete with a metaphorical spark, igniting a possible reason for the alarm he had felt earlier. The person who had woken him up was not only a stranger, but he was notably unaccompanied by Allan, Vicky or Zoë

Edward wondered how many days had passed since he agreed to freeze himself.

This strange new person introduced himself as Wolfram, and before he even began, Edward could see in his face that he had something important to say, and a lot of it.

"I have a gift. A bit like you, right," he began. Edward wondered who in their right mind would call their child Wolfram. It was too cold to wonder how this man knew about Edward's powers. "The past and present determine the future, you see. If something different were to happen in the past, it would lead to a different future…" he paused to rearrange a thought" or at least a different present, as far as is applicable. I still can't believe it myself, actually. I… I found you on a hunch!" Wolfram was not making sense. Not in _this_ situation, wherein it was too cold for Edward to think any deeper than the small pool of water that had brought Jack down what seemed not more than ten minutes ago. What Edward _could_ grasp, however, was that, as fast as he was talking, it was difficult for Wolfram to talk fast enough to keep up with the speed at which he was thinking. He had an excited, desperate sound of urgency in his voice, like a beggar in a third world country who had learned a dance that can make it rain cows.

"What I can do is travel from one of these presents to another. For a long time we thought my ability just hadn't properly developed yet, but I think it's a bit more complicated than that…"

If this enthusiastic man had not been leaning so close, Edward would have seen the Figure entering the cavern. That was the simplest way to describe what was drawing near. It was not a person on account of not being human. It was not even an entity. It was not a whole entity, but it was just as much more than one entity. The most _accurate_ way to describe… this… was an abomination.

If Edward had seen it (or them) enter, he would not have interrupted Wolfram with what he was unaware was, under the circumstances, trivial details. "Wait one minute, you odd person. Where are my allies? They were supposed to unfreeze me as soon as the bomb threat had been neutralized."

"They _did_ ," came a reply that answered no questions at all. "In _this_ reality anyway. But not where _you're_ from."

Edward's thoughts were quite lower-grade given the usual potential of his imagination. It cannot be overstated how harshly the agonizing cold could impact the ability of human thought, which was to lead to an awful tragedy. The thoughts were this: _**In this reality, I was obviously unfrozen by this oddball, as for where I am from, that would be Ardacopolis, and any fool can see I wasn't unfrozen there. I was unfrozen here in Antarctica.**_

At the very least, Edward was still able to detect a hint of silliness in this train of thought, so the reply was something simpler: "If Allan unfroze me, why isn't he here? And if he didn't, why not?"

Wolfram began: "It's complicated, but it's up to you and me to-"

Now many things happened at nearly the same time. Edward became very suddenly aware of a strange scent that stung so deep into his nostrils that the effect was similar to brain freeze. Edward saw that Wolfram smelled it too, and from the look of horror that suddenly flushed over Wolfram's face, Edward quickly concluded that this was something worthy of panic. In just over a split second, the horror on Wolfram's face contorted into what can insufficiently be called agony, but it was as much agony as a solar flare was a smouldering matchstick. Wolfram let out a wail that turned the marrow in Edward's spine into an icicle, but only for a moment because there was now an intense heat coming from the place where Wolfram was standing. Bright orange flames were also engulfing his legs, and quickly spreading until they covered his head. The ice they were standing on did not have time to melt because the intensely hot air was rising too quickly.

It is no fun to watch someone seemingly spontaneously combust until there was only an ash-grey skeleton left. Edward's mind was frozen, figuratively this time, which prevented him from properly taking in the horrid image in front of him. That and the fact that his inability to make sense out of anything that went on since the instant eternity of bluish-white made all of this feel like a kind of dream. Or more accurately now, a nightmare. Unreal, all the same. When the bony frame of Wolfram collapsed, Edward noticed the Figure, or Abomination.

Just looking at it was a lesson in fractions in itself. It was not a cyborg. A cyborg is more or less half man and half robot. It was not a man accompanied by a robot either, on account of these two incomplete entities being decidedly connected. It looked more like a man had half-heartedly attempted to destroy half of himself with the sole purpose of combining himself with half of a robot. The robot half did not fit very well. The more-or-less five quarters of an entity standing a few feet from him looked, on one side, like most of Leather Jack and on the other like the machine half Nathan Mechse. Edward's brain managed: _**This isn't good.**_

The launching of a bright orange fireball from an arm canon on this thing coincided with the piercing stench from an instant before the past-present-future maniac burst into flames. In Edwards now warmed mind, Two and Two equaled Avoid. Luckily he was already piecing together a large thick disc of tungsten using his incredibly versatile ability. Edward was more focused on agility in battle, but occasionally he welcomed the tip his brother had once given him that having a quick defensive trick at hand gave you an extra instance to work out an impressive dodge on the next attack. Combining a block and a dodge, Edward took a small jump and tucked the disc half under, half in front of him. Two massive transfers of energy took place at the same time between it and the fireball. Edward and his shield were propelled upward, knocking the infernal ball of death to the floor, while at the same time a sensation of heat quickly started to build in the slab he was holding. With his feet planted onto his lifeline as firmly as one can plant ones feet on a slab of metal in mid air, he drew his diamond-bladed sword, stabbed at a frozen stalactite and swung forward on it before letting go of the handle. He somehow managed to clasp his unstable foothold between the soles of his shoes and somersaulted, ending it in a fling of the disc toward the sword he had left behind. The stalactite made a hissing sound as it shattered and the sword spun downward, managing to launch itself on a small piece of ice adrift in what used to be the ground Edward and the hideous being were standing on before the sharp-smelling fireball had melted it down. Feeling just a little smug at what he had pulled off, Edward was standing a short while away where the ground was still solid. He caught the spinning sword and re-froze the water surrounding his new enemy, whom had inevitably sunk about five and a half feet, with liquid nitrogen. Unsure how long this would hold him, it or them, he raced outside.

Fifty odd feet from the cave, Edward saw what, at a first glance, was an automobile. The first thing that would have struck most other people in Edward's situation was that it was not discernible as any particular model. The first thing that struck Edward was that it had no wheels. Of course this made more sense to him than it would have had he come across any plain old car with normal wheels intact: There was no way anything short of a snowmobile would make it this far into Antarctica. This car had no _place_ for wheels, and it had what looked like a sort of tailfin. It was also a bit further away than it first appeared to be, on account of it being _bigger_ than it first appeared to be. When he approached it an automatic sliding door let him in. Edward could stand up straight inside, and was able to walk between what appeared to be the front and passenger seat. Remembering the tailfin and the absence of wheels, Edward was slightly excited at his conclusion that was he was, in fact, in a cockpit. The many controls in front of and around him had lights fixed to them, but they were all off except for a large touch-screen showing a destination with a 'tap here to confirm' message, and a display on one side reading 'AUTOMATIC'. The other side of it had darkened letters reading 'MANUAL'. This all seemed easy enough. It struck Edward that this strange hi-tech craft was not even locked. It was obvious that whoever had left it behind was in a great hurry to return to it. "Wolfram," he said to himself, with regret in his voice. Edward tapped 'here'.

As the small airship sped through the moonlit clouds, Edward was slowly falling asleep. He felt frustration toward his twin. Why had he deserted him? Freezing the cave from the inside had been Allan's idea. Allan had an obligation. Couldn't he at least have left a note? … Maybe he did. The Antarctic winds can get quite mean… No. Allan knew that. He would have made a plan. But he knew Allan. He cared about his brother more than anything, apart from the two or three things he cared about equally but in different ways. He could draw only one conclusion: something was seriously wrong.

He awoke a few hours later. It was now daytime. The odd machine was descending, and Edward could see the ground again. Something was missing. These were not the lands Edward knew, despite the coincidence that the aforementioned destination was his hometown of Ardacopolis… Colour. That was what it was. Whenever he was flying over a landscape it was notably less green that he had remembered, and all the cities had an extra tinge of what he could only think of as the colour of neglected stone. An ironic thought because rocks and stones could lie unattended for eons and remain pretty much unchanged. Before he was low enough to realize that the buildings were in fact in a state of decay and paint all over was bleached and badly peeling, Edward thought he saw large black and white striped rectangles slowly moving through the street. As he neared he recognized the shape of biotroops. They were formations of biotroops patrolling the streets. At least, the black bits were. But something was different about them. Parts of them were metallic grey. This did not account for the white lines down the length of the platoons, though. The biotroops, bulky black artificial beings in hats shaped roughly like Leather Jack's, were walking side-by-side with… something else…

The contraption landed at Edward and the team's home-base, which was a bit creepy, but at least Edward started to feel like he was about to start getting a few answers. He was wrong. He alighted from the vehicle and took two steps when a blur flushed over him in an instant and he found himself sitting on the floor. When he looked up, three toughened-up looking youngsters were staring at him like he had intruded into enemy territory. The largest of them spoke. He was well on his way to burly with a slightly pointed nose and dark brown hair with a reddish tinge. The handles of two katanas were visible above both of his broad shoulders. "I didn't know Hazard Inc. was still into cloning."

"What cloning?" asked Edward, who could finally recognize something, even if it was just a misconception. "I am the true and original Edward Kidman!"

A look of puzzlement washed over the three faces as they stood in astonishment. "How is that possible?" asked the short, turquoise-eyed girl with skin, hair and clothes just about the same colour as the blur that had just knocked Edward onto his backside.

"It's every bit possible," Edward's elementary response came automatically; something he was getting used to, "when I exist. It is becoming clear to me that I have missed some-"

His interrupted himself when his nostrils started to sting. He wanted to react but the world suddenly disappeared around him.

He was not dead. In an instant the world was back, but slightly displaced. He saw himself looking _down_ at the spot where he was standing from a short distance away. In the exact spot where he was just before the blur Edward witnessed the collision of the dreaded orange fireball and a familiar looking beam. He followed it with his eyes until he saw the origin. As he expected it came from a trident, but it was not being held by Allan. The taller of the girls, with thick ebony hair and nearly black eyes wearing a pale cyan dress was holding this large weapon with seemingly little effort. Edward saw the tip of her ear sticking out through her hair, but it looked green and spiny. This may have been his imagination. He looked down. He was sitting on the small green eyed beauty's shoulder. The way she was standing, he got the impression his mass was negligible to her. She flung him down gently and disappeared as a blur flashed from where she was toward the source of the fireball. Sure enough, the monster in brown from Antarctica was standing there, the human part of his face as expressionless as the machine half.

If there had been a high speed camera on the scene, it would have revealed the blur to be a tiny girl, back-length red flames of hair blowing back intensely as she pulled two sickles on chains out of sheathes fixed to her thin belt and strafed a whirlwind of nicks, slashes and gashes around the three-quarter-man half-machine. It stuck out a metal hand and there was a loud clang that brought down the razor-sharp hurricane and knocked the part-android back several steps, fighting for balance. The katana-wielder stepped forward and hacked viciously at it. Keeping the slashes at bay with the same forearm that ended the light-speed blade-barrage seemed a challenge amid the stumbling, but not a big one. Before long an armcanon glowing plasma-blue from within was pointed at the new attacker. Edward was astonished not to see him at least flinch at it. When the barrel made an exploding flash, the katana-wielder had raised the back of a fist and the glowing ball dissolved. He did a back flip, kicking the foe in the human part of his face and sheathing his blades. When he landed, he brought the wrists of his bare hands together, one from above and the other from below, palms pointed forward and fingers slightly bent, and the plasma reappeared between his wrists, smaller but condensed, speeding toward its original source.

Edward suddenly noticed his thoughts nagging at him. _**Why aren't you in there?!**_ He asked himself. As he twisted slightly to draw his sword, something shocking caught his eye. He was missing out on the struggle currently happening between the energy-manipulating katana wielder and the semi-android as he stared at the dark haired girl aiming her trident at the badly injured speedster. Edward wondered if this was what supers did if they did not have a healer. He was wrong. They _did_ have a healer. The light coming out of the trident was a warm white instead of a harsh blue, and where it struck, bruises were fading and joints were returning back to their natural positions. _**Enough observation**_ , thought Edward, and jumped in. A fist flew at Edward's chest. It was the villain's left hand, which was on the human side. Odd, then, at a first glance, why the impact had made a metallic clang. It made more sense when a hand-made (more accurately gland-made) piece of metal plating, deformed from the impact, slid out of Edward's shirt. The monstrosity gave a booster-powered leap back and fired another of the dreaded fireballs. Edward was ready to swat it back with his sword when he saw his temporary teammate leap toward him in a push-the-lesser-abled-fighter-out-of-harms-way-and-take-the-mortal-hit-to-show-how-heroic-you-are style. _**You idiot!**_ Edward wanted to say. _**There's no call for that sort of thing! I've got this!**_ But the young man stuck out his hands _toward_ the fireball! The orange flames vanished and the ball, now black, even stopped flying and dropped nearly half a foot from a standstill, pounding a crater in the soil _ **.**_ The man who had just stared down the deathball put his palms, facing down, by his sides. The air directly under them did something odd, almost like a heat haze, and the next moment he was speeding through the air, occasionally throwing a transparent sphere with an electric glow at his foe.

Edward caught himself in the act of staring again. His mind was occupied learning what these new people were capable of, which distracted him from staying in the battle. He was so distracted, in fact, that he only noticed the deflected glowball when it would have been too late if everything had not gone blurry again for an instant. The blur returned to the scene, but even now the enemy was showing no signs of having had enough anytime soon. Edward decided to get some information from the dark haired girl, the only one out of the fray (which made sense because a blast from her trident was more likely to hit the speedster at the moment on account of her being everywhere), before attempting to fight again. "Does this guy never quit?" The singular seemed a simpler way to refer to the enemy.

"Chopping off a limb usually sends him retreating. Trouble with that is the robotic limbs are tougher and more easily repaired, and if we cut off a human limb it will be replaced by a metal one next time."

"Easily taken care of," Edward smiled as he drew his diamond-bladed cut-through-anything sword.

Being further away, the expanding energy shield generated by the image of the two worst villains combined did not hit Edward, but it did knock the other two flying. While the trident-bearing healer was tending to them, Edward decided to act quickly. As the orange glow started to build in the foe's arm canon, Edward grabbed it firmly and froze the mouth shut with liquid nitrogen. It punched at him with this block of ice. Anyone who knew Edward just a little bit would be disappointed in him for failing to dodge such a simple blow. Anyone who knew him well would know he was up to something. A smugly triumphant villain put a metallic foot on Edward's chest and pointed a quickly thawing orange glowing barrel at him. After a lightning fast swipe of diamond the armcanon blasted a fireball in the wrong direction, due mostly to the fact that the leg that had the most weight on it was no longer attached to the body attached to this arm. And a computer-brain trying to figure out how to stand up given that it had one less leg at its disposal is not helped when it gets a smack across it with the very leg it was missing. As it flew off on a single booster-powered foot, it fired a spiteful final laser from the ever-versatile armcanon, which hit the healer.

"Can she heal herself?"

"No."

Inside, the injured girl was laid on a bed and bandaged. Shortly afterwards, someone else entered. He was obviously one of them falling in roughly the same age group if not slightly older. He was wearing black, with dark hair and brown eyes. Whatever he did in battle, it was not physical.

"She hasn't seen him either…" he began before he saw the situation, but stopped when he did, and rushed over. The victim's trident was handed to him, which he turned over and pointed at her. _**Good grief,**_ Edward thought. _**So is**_ **this** _ **what supers do if—**_ He froze the thought right there.

The man in black held a hand toward the victim, whose breath was trembling in pain. Strange, pale blue-green glowing particles, nearly resembling powder, flowed out of her. Where the particles met, they merged into tiny grains, where the grains met they merged into little dots, then into beads and so forth until they were glowing orbs about the size of marbles, which finally phased into his hand. To Edward's surprise, the man's ear tuned into something like a green and spiny fin, and then the friendly white light started to pour out of the trident, and the girl began to relax as her injuries drained away. "Who is this?" The man demanded, indicating toward Edward. "He claims to be Edward Kidman." The larger one replied. Of course we didn't believe him at first, but he has the same ability _and_ weapon; Two of the rarest things on earth. He even rid us of Metal Jack.

"How can that be?" the newcomer was as perplexed as nearly everyone he had met since he woke up. "Tell me, Sir, where did you come from?"

"I was in Antarctica." Edward recounted. "We needed to find and defuse a devastatingly powerful bomb threatening to cause a global flood in an iced cave. The only thing for it was that I freeze the cave from the inside to stop the timer and buy my allies more time. My brother promised to thaw me out, but he didn't."

"That is… strange."The young man in black's face was the look of absolute puzzle. "We've heard that story before… but… with… a… dif-… fe-…rent…" His jaw dropped, and his voice began to wobble. "Um… how _did_ you…"

"Revive? A man named… _Wolfram_ found me. He said it was on a hunch, right in between a whole lot of things I couldn't make much sense of. About the past and present and different futures… or presents."

The room erupted silently as four pairs of eyes shot into saucer mode and three mouths joined the fourth in being pointlessly open. Edward immediately felt bad about the part of the story he still had to tell them. "That's wonderful!" The redhead was the first able to speak again. "That… That means he got his ability!"

"AND WE HAVE EDWARD!" The strange-eared trident-healer exclaimed. "That means… Where is Wolfram now?"

"I'm sorry." Edward did not have the heart to avoid the subject. "He was murdered shortly afterward by that… Metal Jack thing."

All of the faces in the room were now the look bitter grief.

"Give us some time, please." The larger man managed. "In fact, you should go look in the back room."

Approaching the back room, Edward heard a slow, rhythmic beeping gradually grow louder, which he soon identified as the sound of a heart monitor. He also saw a hospital bed that had not been there when he left. His own heart nearly stopped when he saw the inhabitant. Lying there was the horribly aged but unmistakable face of his twin brother. He silently picked up a sort of diary in which he read that Allan had been unconscious for weeks now. But he stirred when Edward said his name, and when his eyes opened, Edward noticed the beeping gradually speed up.

"Edward… how is this even… is this a trick?"

Without a word, Edward produced the necklace given to him what he now knew was many, many years ago. "Wha-…? How did…? Is that from… that day in Antarctica?" the badly aged Allan managed after some thought. I don't understand. We came _back for you._ "

"Is that a fact?!" Edward's frustration boiled over, but with a touch of sympathy. "Then why are you so surprised to see me?"

"Because… you're dead, Brother!"

Seven odd years after the Antarctica incident, so Allan told, the four heroes set out to catch up to the giant airship that was the airbourne base of Nathan Mechse and The System. The details of the mission had been forgotten, but unimportant. In seven years the Kidmans and their spouses, as well as The System, had developed incredibly. A battle between four amazingly talented superpowered individuals and a massive robotic army rocked the stratosphere and lit up the night sky in dazzling flashes of light. The fight eventually condensed to end with Edward and Nathan, both badly hurt. Edward was more mobile, but Nathan had since gained an Auto-repair programme and wasn't going to stay down for much longer. Edward was the only one who truly had Nathan's weakness at his disposal. It was known since their first encounter with The System that Nathan had a nuclear reactor in his metallic chest, and a well placed neutron in the radioactive power source could set off a chain reaction that invariably destroyed Mechse's base in a nuclear holocaust. But the Alphaproducer, the true core of The System, was an immense highly advanced computer coupled to a complex assembly line type machine responsible for production of all that is The System, contained in an ultra-fortified core of the air base that always remained unharmed. It happened, then, that whenever the Alphaproducer detected that the rest of the base had been destroyed, it would assemble a few metalrogues from its emergency supply. These basic, high-speed untouchable drones would fly into the world and collect any and every piece of metal, circuit board, fissionable material or other component it could find for resurrecting the army, including building more metalrogues, and bring it back, restarting everything and eventually rebuilding Mechse himself and even the rest of the airbase. In a moment of desperation, Edward started to create a lead capsule over himself, at the same time coating both fists in clouds of millions of neutrons. He gave a leap towards Nathan before sealing the encasement, trapping them both. He slammed his subatomically enhanced hands into the nearest opening in the steel chassis while the coffin for two tumbled through a hole in the airship created in the fray. That is how Edward Kidman and Nathan Mechse died in the same nuclear explosion that harmed nothing else. It was a great shame that Edward hadn't known he was, in fact, not really the last one standing, and Vicky could have instantly healed him, making the rest of the battle go much easier. The Alphaproducer sped on into the night, its crew leaderless and its core fully satisfied that the base is still mostly unharmed.

"After that," The story headed toward an end. "Jack Jr., heir of Hazard Inc. found the remains of Nathan washed up on a beach somewhere, and got Professor Tech to rather crudely use them to turn him into the monster known today as Metal Jack. The biotroops went cyborg. And this is what has become of the world since."

"All of this happened just because the defenders lost one member?" Edward asked.

"Hardly," Allan replied. "With you gone, Nate Beta-unit quickly fell into disrepair. Zoë was crushed. For weeks she did nothing but lie in bed and cry, and after that she just did nothing. Hazard Inc. got to her one day when she was weak. All I wanted to do was battle. I went out _looking_ for opportunities to foil plots of theirs. I set them back quite badly, but I aged quickly. This is what became of me in fifty short years."

"What happened to Vicky?"

"Vicky raised the children, and then she disappeared."

"Children? What chil…" Edward knew the answer even before the question was completely out. It made sense: These super-powered youngsters were his and Allan's descendants.

"The muscly one who absorbs and expels energy through his hands, and the small, super strong, speedy redhead are your grandchildren. Their names are Nova and Everest. The other two are mine. Victor, who can copy other superpowers, and Alice, who can use my trident both for healing and firepower." You got a son too. Great kid. His name's…"

Edward was running through the streets. It seemed like the logical thing to do after the things he just heard and saw. Allan was able to tell him the only things that could possibly be worse than him waking up fifty years later in a world where he was dead just before the heart monitor's beeping went slower again and ended in a long stretched out tone. Edward thought about the name Wolfram again; an element of the periodic table (aka tungsten; one that Edward used quite often, in fact) _and_ a popular material to send electricity through. In _his_ day, anyway. The perfect name for where Edward meets Zoë. And Edward watched him light up a cave and burn to ash. The unrealness of the situation was probably the only thing still keeping him going. Edward did not relent when the third generation advised him against heading out alone. He just needed to expend some energy. Before long he found the perfect outlet. A lone mecha-biotroop was surveying a street corner.

In one move, the mecha-biotroop dodged Edward's first sword swing and lunged at Edward. He was knocked back but quickly recovered. Before Edward knew it he was subjected to a barrage of plasma blasts which he evaded with a series of hops and leaps, ending them with a high jump. While airborne he pointed his sword downward and let gravity pull him toward his foe. The mecha-biotroop leapt back and wound up a punch which it launched as soon as Edward was on the floor. Edward kept descending though, ending in a squat and making the mecha-biotroop trip over him. He quickly shot a few blasts of liquid nitrogen, securing the freak of technology to the floor like a frog on a dissection stage and ended it with his sword. _**Quite tough for just a lone troop,**_ he thought. The next thing Edward thought was _**what on this ruined earth just happened?!**_

After feeling just the slightest touch from behind Edward was now lying on his back on the floor, unable to move. Also, he could not feel the floor under him. All he could feel was a coldness on the tips of his fingers and his toes. Something else was wrong, too, but he could not place it yet. Edward then realized that the coldness in his extremities was spreading up, and by the time it covered his hands and feet, he realized what the other thing was: the periphery of his vision was black and, like the coldness, this too was spreading inward, taking over from the norm. By the time the entirety of his arms and legs were engulfed by the chill, Edward could not see past the second floor of the building across the street. He did not know why this was happening to him, but he had some idea what exactly it was that _was_ happening, and as it turns out, he was right. His idea was supported when he realized he was still breathing, but he only did because he realized his breathing was becoming slower and shallower in proportion to the spread of the coldness and the blackness. For a reason unknown to himself, Edward was dying. When the depth of his breaths was nearing that of a coffee mug and the coldness closing in around his eyes, he saw in a circle of vision about the size of the brightest part of the light from a torch shone against a wall a pair of feet descending from the sky. _**See you soon, Allan.**_

But Edward felt sudden relief. The circle of his vision expanded again, air returned to his lungs and the coldness retreated. He saw the feet that had descended belonged to someone in a flowing white dress. Then he saw the person's hands with their palms extended toward him in a familiar fashion. Equally familiar was the white light emanating from them. "Am I ever glad to see you, Vicky!"

"These are certainly strange days." The old woman said. "Or I am finally losing my mind." Vicky was standing right in front of him, but so much of her was gone. Her hair was quickly going grey and the blueness of her eyes in this form was faded into a cold stone color. Her once beautifully plump lips were deflated and sad, and her flawless pale skin was blemished and wrinkled, most pronounced as worry lines, but they also were quite obviously long since functional, since all of her emotions were at last abandoned.

"Vicky…" Edward began "I need your help. I don't know why or what with, I just…"

"Do you even exist? Is any of this real? I mean, you're dead, right?"

"Vicky, look at me! Something is very wrong! This is not the world we would have allowed, is it? Somehow we must be able to fix it. We always have! Remember when we had me frozen? Somehow something happened. I was unfrozen but I wasn't, and now the frozen me got unfrozen and…"

" _No! You_ look at _me_!" Edward did. In her eyes he saw fifty years' worth of suppressed feelings. Of pain not only ignored by the man she loved, but by herself, eventually. "For decades all I wanted to do was fight! Was fix it! But there were more important things, and then it was too late." I woke up one morning and the world was grey, and I realized that I spent fifty years raising two children to live in hell on earth. It was either that, or risk my life fixing it and eventually have nobody to pass it on to. So I left. And that's what I'm going to do now." At that, she turned her back toward him and started to ascend again slowly.

"Vicky…" She turned around again. "... You… did a good job… raising those kids." He decided not to tell her about Allan's death.

"I didn't think I would ever hear someone say that to me." He saw a tear zigzagging down the complicated grooves in her cheek before she turned away again and made for the sky.

Edward avoided being spotted as he walked home and began to think sensibly for the first time in half a century. Nearly nothing made sense, so he was to start with what he knew for certain. Thoughts were colliding in his head, but not dynamically like molecules. They collided slowly and with great tension, like massive tectonic plates being forced together, attempting to occupy the same space, not at all concerned that this was a physical impossibility. He knew that he had been frozen, and when he woke up it was fifty years later. He also knew that he _had_ in fact _also_ been defrosted half a century back, as was evidenced by the existence of descendants. Obviously he could not have somehow been re-frozen when they thought he had died and just lost the memories of the seven years in-between because he was still twenty-four years old and still had the necklace given to him on that day. There had to have been something he was not considering

The thing about this sort of tension is that that is how mountains are formed.

 _ **What was it that Wolfram had said? That with different pasts come different presents and different futures. Timelines. That must have been the word he had been looking for. Now**_ **that** _ **made sense. 'Where you're from', were his words. My original timeline, he must have meant. Wolfram can cross timelines! From this reality, where I had been unfrozen and killed, to one where Allan had left me for some reason and I waited there for fifty years until Wolfram found me. But I'm not satisfied. The past doesn't just change. Things happen because the things that happen before them**_ **make** _ **them happen. Even when we change our minds, we change them because of who we are, and we are who we are mostly because of what happened in the past. When people talk about 'changing history', what they're really doing is**_ **making** _ **history. Even in the event of knowing what will happen in the future it's still tricky to change what will happen distinct from what was going to happen in the first place. No. Getting different timelines to form is more complicated than that. You need something big. Something like…**_

"There you are!" He was snapped out of it by Everest when he arrived back at the home-base. "You really shouldn't go out on your own. The patrols will get you."

"We need to talk." Edward had important matters to discuss. "Why all the excitement when you learned who I am?"

"As Allan withered down in his old age, he became quite the storyteller. He would always say that if only you had still been with us we could have fixed everything. He seemed to believe that you could somehow change the past, but he couldn't quite remember the details. And then Wolfram had gone and found you. He knew what his power was, but he never seemed able to manage anything, like his power took longer than all of ours to develop."

"I don't think that's it," pondered Edward when he remembered something else Wolfram said. "I think Wolfram couldn't find another timeline to cross _into_ because there are very few other timelines out there. New timelines, as I see it, are impossible unless you can actually interfere with the past, and even then you have to avoid paradoxes, or maybe you just need a dipartite paradox _linking_ them somehow, but I think that might only be possible if you can do what Wolfram could." Then a frown appeared on his forehead. "Me? Change the past? No. Allan traveled back a day once, though. Other than that I can't think of anything else along that line."

"Allan traveled through time? How did he do that?"

"There was this one time when an ancient relic created a creature from me." He joined two dots in his mind, but it was still a no go. "It made a black hole that sucked Allan in and spewed him into the past, and it enabled him to stop it from destroying the world."

Everest brightened up like a black hole that had a supernova go off in it. "Well that's it, then! We should do just that and the whole world will be fixed!" The others had overheard and were joining them.

"No," Edward declined. "Out of the question. It was by sheer luck that Allan was able to travel back a day. Where exactly you'll end up in space-time after dealing with a black hole is too unpredictable and the vortex itself is far more likely to inhale the entire solar system than send anyone to any other time. Do you have any idea what the odds are? Because I don't."

"The odds," echoed Victor with a faint grin and a sparkle in his eye that, Edward was willing to bet, he had not had in many years, if ever, "are really quite good if you have what we have. "

"And what do we have?"

"We have Clarity."

Clarity Kidman, daughter of Allan and Vicky and mother of Victor and Alice, kept the name Kidman when she married for the legacy of heroes associated with it. She looked to Edward every bit as divine as humanly possible. An entire forehead taller than Edward, all of her features were closer to white than Edward had ever seen. Her hair looked crystal blonde or old-lady white, but was in fact the same color as the fur of a polar bear, which is transparent. Her eyes were so light blue that Edward needed to focus very hard to see she had irises at all, and she looked as though she had, for as long as she had lived, never seen the sun. She spoke with the tone of voice of someone that people would call "enlightened", and that she was every bit, as Edward had learned, for her gift was being able to detect what other peoples' gifts were and how they worked. That was how Wolfram had known what _his_ gift had been before he could actually use it. "Victor says you can tell me how to travel back in time just by looking at a black hole?"

"That is true. As long as it is generated by someone's special gift, I can see all there is to know about it."

"Then we definitely have to give it a go. Even if we fail, I know how to close the black hole." Edward was piecing together sketchy visualizations of a strategy; an important technique in his line of work. "There's one other detail: we need to get our hands on something called the balance mirror. Where is that nowadays?"

"Ah, everyone knows that." said Nova in a general knowledge tone of voice. "Hazard Inc. Headquarters. Metal Jack made sure everyone knew that when he finally found it."

"Hazard Inc.?" Edward was pulling the pieces of the plan apart again to make room for an army of semi-mechanical biotroops and a bloodthirsty deranged cyborg. "We can't afford to give it anything less than everything we've got."

"What about even more than we've got?" Victor appeared to have another idea. "We have a deactivated, badly damaged Nate Beta Unit stored in the workshop. Do you think you can fix him?"

"It's certainly worth a try. Take me to him."

Moments later, two glowing yellow eyes flickered on. "Can thi-is be? Am I just malf-f-f-functioni-ing?" Nate Beta-unit was up and running, albeit suboptimally.

"You said that the day we met." The man and the robot hugged. An odd sight to see for the grandchildren, but the reunion was _that_ significant to them. "We're off to Hazard Inc. to fix the past. Are you in?"

"You needn't ask twice." His voice was a bit tinnier than it should be, and an occasional spark flew wherever he moved, but it was better than being totally inanimate.

"Okay…" The team was gathered around a table save for Nate, who was stocking up on resources. There was an air of nervous excitement as the battle strategy that was to fix Everything was being discussed. "Essentially, we need three things: Myself, the balance mirror and Clarity. As for the finer details, Clarity needs to be protected from Jack and the mecha-biotroops, and of course Anti-Edward, to such an extent that she can analyze the latter while the black hole is being formed. I also need to be kept in a position to invoke the supernova in the event of something going wrong."

"Leave that to us, Gramps!" A confident Everest spoke on behalf of the four younger ones.

"Don't call me that. Then the tricky part: Anti-Edward will only create the black hole as a last resort. Even with Allan and the girls by my side, he existed for nearly a whole day before he did it, and this time round we won't _have_ a whole day."

"That'd be where I come in!" It was Nova's turn to sound confident. "I can do _anything_ at record speed, not least of all drive someone up the wall."

"Perfect," nodded Edward. "We may just have a shot at this."

Hazard Inc. Headquarters was a frightening place, even in Edwards' original time. Basically an enormous bioengineering laboratory heavily guarded by its own products. Biotroops were, in fact, a mass-produced soldier force made by what was in many senses Hazard Inc.'s equivalent of the Alphaproducer. Once the ideal procedure for artificially creating computer-programmable sapient life-forms was determined, Professor Tech built the Biogenesis 5000 to industrialize the process. In twenty odd minutes it could create a small army. The security system in itself was, if anything, a tad less than one would expect from a lair of this degree, but only because Jack had had great confidence in the patrols of biotroops frequenting its many hallways, and usually preferred the security option that involved bloodshed.

As bad as it was, the HQ was an even more upsetting place now, as it was essentially devoid of humanity and therefore had a deserted look and feel, walls as bleached and peeling as those of the rest of the world. It was like a combination of your typical evil headquarters and the neighbourhood haunted house. Numerous as they were, the legionnaires were spread out over the entire city so sneaking in was not very difficult. The team knew, though, that as soon as they were spotted they would be surrounded by as many mecha-biotroops as Hazard Inc. could care to create and sustain in forty three odd years, not to mention the other things Edward saw in formation with them earlier when he flew over the city. He was soon to figure out what they were…

It was when they ducked into an abandoned surveillance chamber when Edward saw the display on the screen. If it had not been as alarming a sight as it was it would have been one of the most awesome things Edward had ever seen. On the left side was the Alphaproducer and on the right was the Biogenesis 5000. They gradually merged toward the bottom so as to end in a single outlet where, obviously, the half-robot-half-biotroop soldiers would emerge in their vast numbers. It would have surprised Edward that such a rough attempt at joining together the two most advanced supercomputers ever built could result in anything remotely operational if it had not been for the third quarter of this setup: Joining them in hundreds or even thousands of circuits was a stasis tank containing the most advanced supercomputer ever to exist naturally, namely Professor Tech's brain. And finally, beneath this complex network, turned sideways to act as a sort of trapdoor frame, hung the balance mirror. Edward saw one of the white creatures march past and got a good look, allowing him to put two and two together. It equaled terror. It essentially looked like one of the biotroops of the age, except that it was white where the mecha-biotroops were black. Immediately after being created they would drop through the balance mirror, spawning their antithesis. If biotroops were artificially created _life_ , then…

On closer inspection its skin was somewhat transparent, and Edward could see it was only bulky because it was inflated. He could also see its skeleton, which was quite a scary thing to see. The _real_ chill hit Edward when he took a closer look at its hands. The skin was tighter around it giving it an exceptionally bony look. They looked like the hands of the Grim Reaper. Edward remembered lying on his back with a coldness creeping over him from his extremities.

Edward pointed at the screen. "That's where we need to go. I know how to get there. I've been here enough times to know my way around quite well, and I recognize the area."

"Lead the way!" Alice said brightly. "Let's have a show of hands; who votes we do this the quiet way?"

The next moment they were charging down the corridors of Hazard Inc., occasionally slowing down a bit to strike down a mecha-biotroop or anti mecha-biotroop with a combined effort. Naturally, Edward was in the lead since he knew where they were going. Alice, Everest, Nate Beta-Unit and Victor were in the middle of the party, helping Edward cover the front, since that was where they collided with most adversaries, as well as the sides, taking them while they were still diagonal. They were also protecting Clarity, whose forte was not battle. Trailing behind them a blur with the distinctive red and yellow colors recognizable as belonging to Nova was darting from side to side ending the artificial lives of anything that got too close. Edward was relieved to see that, as mortally dangerous as they were, the anti mecha-biotroops easily went down by puncturing their thin skin or burning their dark gray wooden bits, which they had where the mecha-biotroops had light grey metallic bits.

When they were one room away from their goal, they were finally headed off by a proper army of the original mecha-biotroops. On their right was a flight of stairs on top of which stood Metal Jack looking artificially smug, arm canon pointed at them. Victor was holding a white-glowing hand toward a deflating anti mecha-biotroop exerting a few last twitches. He leapt into the army and went into a stylish frenzy of sorts. Though the punches, chops swipes and kicks were certainly impressive, they had little strength behind them. They did not need any: with the anti mecha-biotroop's death-touch at his command, he merely needed to make contact to have the enemies sink to the ground.

Meanwhile, the rest of them were dodging a barrage of metal pellets the size of marbles. They were slowly advancing toward the source, which was only capable of keeping one attacker at bay at a time, and this problem grew when one of them suddenly created a large tungsten shield and was now charging toward him. He quickly switched the pellet-sprayer beyond the opening in his arm with a high-powered electron gun and blasted it directly at him. Just as Edward fell to the floor, Nate Beta-Unit jumped in front of him, into the flow of electricity. At the same time, a few mecha-biotroops escaped the one-man-dominated fray to occupy the remaining four invaders.

With two enemies struggling on the ground, Metal Jack stepped slowly towards them. He paused when he reached Nate Beta-Unit, who was closer. He pointed an intensifying orange-glowing armcanon at him just before he was distracted by the voice of Edward using the distract-the-foe-by-yelling-something-starting-with-'Hey!' technique. "Hey! _I'm the escaped experiment_! You've got unfinished business with _me_!" The hideous figure froze for a while. Jack Jr. was focused on his fathers' nemesis and Nathan Mechse was focused on his second-in-command turned traitor. Behind the shade-covered eyes, a compound brain was having an argument with itself.

Nate Beta-Unit suddenly sat up and plunged his index finger into the back of Metal Jacks' neck. Edward had caught a glimpse of the finger, and it had been converted such that it was tipped with something like a universal serial bus, only with sharp edges. His other hand had contracted to make way for a large electrode, which was numbingly electrocuting Metal Jack at point-blank range. "Let's see-ee what's g'ood… Hmm… Ahh. An auto-repair progr-ram. Most fascina-ating…" He went silent for a moment as the sparks stopped flying from his joints. Then he spoke with a voice less tinny than before, like Edward remembered it, and the stutter was gone. "Thank you kindly." A fist suddenly shot up and knocked Nate Beta-Unit back several feet. Metal Jack leapt backwards, lightning bolts still coursing over his surfaces and disappeared through a metallic wall that became a door very briefly. Edward, Nate Beta-Unit, Everest, Nova and Alice all joined Victor and finished off the last of the current mecha-biotroop army.

After healing up, they finally reached the immense circular room where the mecha-biotroops and anti mecha-biotroops got spawned. It had four doorways leading out of it including the one that the six of them entered through. Artificial legions were rushing in from all three other entrances as well as being created from the source which their target formed a part of. There was now an army you could take over a country with standing in front of them, and it was still getting bigger "Get to the balance mirror!" Everest called to Edward. "We'll hold them off as best we can!" Getting to the balance mirror was easier said than done, seeing as it was three stories above them. As chaos ensued around him, Edward started running, drawing his sword. He took a jump, leapfrogged off a mecha-biotroops' head and plunged his sword into a nearby wall. A little while above his head he saw a crack in the wall that he could easily jab a metal spike into, and he thus began to assemble one.

Meanwhile on the ground floor the rest of the team were putting everything they had into protecting the serene Clarity from a seemingly endless onslaught of what looked like two rivaling armies from a chess set gone wrong that had joined forces against a common foe. Nate Beta unit was using his many combat functions from Gatling guns to flame throwers, Victor was still death-touching, Everest was throwing enemies off by messing with their physics, Alice was wreaking havoc with a trident and Nova was fighting five battles in five different places at the same time. Anti mecha-biotroops were going down more often than mecha-biotroops not only because it took less to beat them but also because if they approached any of the five frays they were taken first because everyone knew what a threat they were.

Edward, his sword retrieved, was now shimmying on an extravagant pelmet. He saw a ventilation duct several feet away that he thought might provide a foothold for his next move upward. Although he knew he had important things to do, he cast an eye over the ruckus below and wished he could help.

"You guys holding out okay?!" Everest yelled above the crashes, cracks and clangs

"Just barely!" came Victor's reply. "How about you, Alice?

"I'm okay! There's so many of them!"

They did not even ask Nova. With reflexes like hers it was like the world was moving in slow motion. It was nearly impossible for her not to be on top of her game. That was what made her so vital for carrying out the mission. In actual fact, Nova was forgetting something, and so were the others…

Clarity was looking around worriedly. The battle raging around her had everyone intensely occupied and she was concerned whether they had enough focus left to protect her. The way things looked, they could not _afford_ to focus on anything aside from defending themselves, let alone protect someone who is unarmed and has no combat-assisting superpower.

She was interrupted in mid-thought by a fist coming down in an attempt to hammer her into the floor like a nail. She leapt out of its way but landed badly, falling over backward. As it was winding up another blow it was suddenly impaled from above by a diamond-bladed sword. With great effort, she pulled the sword out of the floor, and then she looked up at Edward who gave her a supportive nod. Clarity wielded the sword with both hands; awkwardly but confidently.

Edward was making progress toward his goal. With one more floor to go things were looking good. The walls here were quite brittle, and by coating his fingertips with spiky shells he could climb diagonally toward the Biogenesis 5000. He set foot on it soon enough as he smartly landed going down on his hands and one knee. Panting, he looked up… into the face of Metal Jack. Unarmed and exhausted, Edward was to battle with this monstrosity alone. It opened up with one of the sharp-smelling fireballs which, given his position, Edward had to dodge with a roll. Edward's knee thumped the ground sharply in the process, making standing up even more difficult. Metal Jack effortlessly floated closer on a set of foot boosters and once again prepared his armcanon… which was immediately frozen with liquid nitrogen. Edward supported his weight on his hands and swung his body round tripping Metal Jack with his legs. He quickly froze a few more points against the ground to keep his adversary down while he stood up and positioned his hands for a thick tungsten pole. Nothing formed. Edward had depleted his sugar reserves.

The mishap that had nearly happened prompting Edward to temporarily get rid of his weapon alerted the fighters on the ground floor to priority one anew. They changed to a formation stacked more around Clarity making for a safer zone in between them, and even if the odd foe slipped by them, Clarity could keep them at bay using Edwards sword for long enough to have one of the others free themselves up and come to her aid. Nova, who moved around most and had the best view of what was going on, was the first to notice something was suddenly different. "Where's Nate?"

Edward was edging backwards fighting hard against the notion to jump off and hope Everest sees him and stops his fall. It would have meant climbing all the way up again. He started when he backed up into a metallic body. Nate Beta-Unit was suddenly with him. A small opening formed in his torso from which he produced a container. "Here, I thought you might want this."

"So you finally had the coffee machine installed?" Edward asked with a smile and new hope as he took it from Nate. "Thank you. I'm glad I had _that_ idea. And they thought it was lame!" He gulped it down quickly and felt his power return. Nate had intentionally not made it too hot to drink quickly, as well as sweetening it more than Edward usually likes it so as to restore his sugar reserve. "Back to business!"

"I have to get back down there." Nate said. "They need me." And with that Edward was on his own again.

It was while he was breaking off the last chunk of ice that Metal Jack got the tungsten pole in the head. He flew back several feet and extended his armcanon before he collapsed. A strange light blue wave came out of it and quickly faded. Edward was about to think that whatever Metal Jack tried to do had failed when he felt the machine he stood on begin to shake and heard the sound of cables snapping. _**But the nearest cables to where I'm standing are…**_ He ran to the edge that was facing the Alphaproducer and then he saw it: With connecting circuitry snapping rapidly, the stasis tank containing the great brain was slowly rising like a great angry squid. As they snapped free the cables were being positioned as though they were whip-like tentacles ready to lash. Sparks were shooting like camera flashes in a stadium during a prestigious event, and Edward noticed all of the cable-tentacles appearing to be poised at him.

"Something big is going on up there!" Alice grabbed a small dangling bit of Victor's attention, most of which was focused on thinning out the vast army surrounding them.

"I have his sword!" Clarity quickly pointed out. "If he needs it and he's in trouble, I'd rather he take it. He's as vital to all our success as I am, and I have all of you watching my back!"

Victor stuck a hand toward Nova. "Someone should check it out!"

Edward was leaping and rolling around frantically as he dodged cables flicking, jabbing and whipping at him. He ducked under a high one, jumped over a low one, and did a back flip that would have made impressive slow-motion footage as one came diagonally from below. Edward fashioned a few shurikens and flung it at the glass dome. Each one made a crack. _**All right!**_ He thought and dodged a few more tentacles. At that moment he noticed a blur ascending against one of the walls. This blur was mostly black and dark brown. It reached the ceiling and changed direction so as to be moving along it, and as it neared the area above the biogenesis 5000 another blur, this one transparent and purple shot out form it moving roughly in Edwards' direction. The next moment the floor just in front of him had his sword stuck into it. A cable-tentacle hanging directly above it was severed. "Let's cut you down!" He said aloud as he wrestled his weapon out of the floor, although he was unsure whether the brain could hear him. He pictured himself following up each leap with a slash of his sword, but what happened next gave him another idea: as he freed the blade he noticed two cables pointed straight at him coming from either side. He lunged backward and they connected _with each other._ Edward saw the stasis tank shake slightly while appearing to have trouble pulling them apart. This was when he noticed that one cable was among the ones at were feeding into the Alphaproducer, and the other had fed into the Biogenesis 5000. _**That's it!**_ Edward grabbed the next cable that came toward him by its insulation. He struggled with its thrashing as he grabbed the next. It was from the same side, and putting them together yielded no effect. Holding two cables proved significantly harder, and Edward had to slash at the next one. The cables he was holding flailed free. _**I need another technique.**_ Edward ducked behind a vertical support beam and removed his belt, which he cut in half. He folded the two halves down the middle and tucked them into his back pocket, before he charged at the stasis tank. Leaping increasingly wildly as the lashing tentacles grew more frequent toward the middle. He reached the area under the dome where he was somewhat out of reach, and grabbed half of the cables in one overloaded hand at the spot where they were rooted. He took the half of his belt that had the buckle and wrapped it around the bundle, fastening it tightly. He slid the belt down the column until it was near the end, squeezing all its terminals into one small area.

Then he ran back toward the center, this time with half the amount of tentacles thrashing around than the first time, plus one really big one. He repeated the exercise, this time melting the end of his belt to fix it into a ring, and slid it toward the other end. There were now two large clumps of cables striking at him. Edward summoned up all of his strength and grabbed each one in a hand and forced them together. The water in the tank boiled as surges of electricity were frying Professor Tech's brain. Still holding the two wire bundles together, Edward secreted roughly half a liter of liquid nitrogen and cooled them down to freezing point. Anyone who knows anything about electricity knows that the conductivity of a conductor increases with a decrease in temperature. The brain was expressing as much agony as a disembodied brain possibly can. Finally he dashed forward, took a jump, drew his sword and plunged it through the cracked glass, right down the middle of the two lobes. A final wave of motion surged through the cables before they fell limp. Edward leapt off and landed on top of the Alphaproducer.

As he was getting his breath back he suddenly smelled trouble and dashed aside only just too late. A bright orange ball of wildfire grazed his shoe and immediately set it ablaze. Thinking quickly Edward kicked it off in mid-leap, and then realized there was no foothold below him. He had jumped off the edge of the Alphaproducer and landed on the conveyer belt feeding chunks of metal to the machines' inlet. It was still running, but without the coordination of Techs' brain, who knew _what_ it was making? Very likely junk. The next thing Edward knew he was dodging various units of machinery used for turning scrap metal into robotic soldiers. That meant at first potentially getting flattened, cut up, ground down and melted, and then cast into various shapes before being reassembled. Edward smartly avoided everything that came toward him until he saw the inevitability of the extremely high temperature that made up the last step of processing the metal itself, when he thought _**you know what? To hell with this.**_ From outside the Alphaproducer came the expensive sound of highly sophisticated machine components being flash-frozen, crushed and sliced up until there was just a conveyor belt running through an empty tunnel.

A few seconds later Edward dropped out of the outlet of the compound machine and through the sideways-hanging Balance Mirror, and out of the side facing up shot his photonegative reflection. "It's been a long time, old friend," Edward said under his breath as he landed.

"Join the others," Nova said to Edward calmly as she stepped forward. "I'm up."

Not even the ability to conjure up antimatter was enough to even land a blow on Nova. If Anti-Edward held an antimatter covered hand at where she was standing, she would suddenly not be standing there anymore. If he surrounded his body with antimatter, she would _crawl_ at lightning speed and knock him off his feet, and if he shrouded himself form head to toe, she would run circles around him until a whirlwind dissipated his protection. He came to realize the only way he was going to rid himself of this nuisance that started plaguing him not two seconds after he entered the world, would be to _end_ the world, and his eyes blackened like it did many years ago.

Everything in the HQ was bolted down, so something stable to hold on to was not difficult to find. That did not even matter, though, because the heroes strangely found that they were not being sucked in, even though there were entire streams of mecha-biotroops flying toward the same spot from the other side of the room. When Edward turned to look at the black hole, he saw Everest, from behind, with both hands stuck out towards it. Clarity closed her eyes. "Many factors will play a role in your destination, Edward, but they can all be connected to timing, as the black hole will grow in intensity over time, affecting the degree to which it bends time, the speed at which it will suck you in andsoforth. When I give the signal, Everest, you stop absorbing the energy, and you, Edward, take a leap into the darkness. Everyone else, brace yourselves."

"Got it!"

"Be ready. The time is near."

"Thank you, all of you, for everything. I cannot tell you how proud I am and how sorry I am for the way I made your world turn out just by pulling a stupid move in combat, even though I haven't actually done it yet. It's still the sort of thing I would have done had I not known better. I promise you that I will do it differently this time. **I will change the past!** Goodbye. You're a fantastic group of kids."

"Any moment… **Wait!** " Clarity suddenly sounded alarmed.

"What's wrong?"

"Edward, this is terrible! You have to neutralize the black hole! It's going to destroy everything!"

"What?! No! I'm going to stop all of this from happening!"

"It's not as simple as that! The black hole is more powerful than we had anticipated! It's going to bend time so far that it will suck up both timelines!"

It struck Edward that this had all been for naught. They had to put an end to their very own enterprise because it was going to negate itself. The only reason it had worked in the past for Allan was because Edward could stay behind to create a supernova and prevent the destruction the portal could potentially create.

But then Victor approached Edward. He put out a hand and purple lights flowed from Edward into it. "Go. I've got this." Victor said as a supernova-white light started in his eyes.

This satisfied Clarity. "Alright, everyone! Hold on to something solid! … Everest, **now!** "

Edward felt the void pull him in, but his trip stopped short when a determined hand grabbed his arm so tightly that he felt his blood supply cut off instantly. Metal Jack had been inching through the intense streams and, though he had no idea what Edward was doing, wanted to put an end to it. Edward flailed in vain. He simply could not let this monstrosity put an end to his endeavour, but it seemed as though that was not his choice.

It was not Metal Jack's choice either; not for long. It was Nate's. Metal Jack learned this the hard way as the full weight of an angry, human-sized mass of metal lunged at him, prying open the tight hold he did not think he was going to lose so quickly. Suddenly, as planned, Edward was spiraling into the darkness before him.

Hazard Inc. HQ was looking the way it did in Edward's days when a black dot appeared a few feet above the ground in the Biogenesis Hall. The black dot expanded into the shape of a person before turning into a temporarily airborne Edward Kidman, who quickly fell to the floor. _**I've definitely gone back, but how far?**_ Edward wondered. He also made a mental note that he would have much preferred to be glad to see something else from his original time. He noticed another black dot appear where he had, and quickly stepped aside as his silver ally materialized and dropped. "What are you doing here?" He whispered, so as not to alert anyone or anything

"I… don't know" Nate calculated (as opposed to thinking) for a second. "Ah… the black hole sucked me in."

"Do you know what year this..?" Edward began before he was interrupted by a gentle but urgent beeping from Nate's torso.

"This must be an error caused by the space-time strain," Nate hazarded. "It appears as though you have sent me an assistance request… from the South Pole."

"I don't believe it!" Edward unintentionally raised his voice "I know what day this is! Come on, I'm about to get frozen so there isn't much..!" Edward was interrupted by an urgent sound again; this time the intruder alert of Hazard Inc.

Neither of them were up for another goonbashing. Nate pulled a forcefield around the both of them, which took quite a beating as they sped toward the lair's hangar where they hijacked a small airship. Nate was able to pilot it using his USB finger function. Edward helped himself to more onboard snacks than were intended for a single flight and took a well earned nap.

He awoke to Leather Jacks voice over a radio. Nate Beta-Unit was dealing with a crisis. "I don't know how you got your tin mitts on one of my ships, but I can spare one. That isn't to say I'm just gonna let you have it, mind you; not the _ship,_ anyway. You can outfly my blimp, but not these nukeyeller missiles!"

The channel went silent, and the radar screen showed five dots closing in on them. Edward tried to stay calm. "What's the course of action? Eject seats?"

"We'd be sitting ducks."

"How about shooting at the missiles?" They were drawing near

"A possibility. Loading…" and after a moment "Negative. Ship ammunition not stocked."

"Then what do we do?" Staying calm was getting tricky

"Calculating…" And then Nate did what passed for relaxing if you're a robot. Edward could tell because his manner of speaking turned more humanlike again, not like the way one would expect a computer to talk, which was the way he spoke under pressure.

"I have prepared the ship's missile launchers. Give me thirty seconds to insert myself into the barrel, then press this big red button here."

"And?"

"I will overheat my circuits as you speed away, and the missiles will charge at me instead."

"Smart! Then they crash helplessly against your forcefield, right?"

"Negative. My force field would block out the heat, and the missiles would reengage the previous target viz. you."

"But can your auto-repair programme recover you after five nuclear missiles hit you at the same time? I'm not letting you get destroyed again!"

"I would rather not think of it that way. Just remember that I am from a future that you are trying to prevent from happening, so technically I needn't exist" He started for the ammo loading bay, then he paused. "Give this to me." He said and produced a compact disc.

"What is it?"

"It is a copy of all my upgrades for the next seven years. I am sure it will be quite helpful. Farewell, Edward."

"Goodbye, Nate. I'll take good care of you."

Edward bit his lip as he heard an explosion trying in vain to catch up with the airship, which had its coordinates set for Antarctica.

A thought struck him suddenly when several things pawed at his mind at the same time. Wolfram said that he had retrieved him, Edward, from his _original_ timeline. Clarity had warned Edward that the black hole could suck up _both_ timelines, and Nate Beta-Unit said that his destruction did not matter, because he was from a future that Edward was going to prevent from happening. If that had been true the compact disc Edward had tucked into a pocket should not have existed, but if what Edward was intending to do was indeed futile after all, there would have been no alternate timeline for Wolfram to get a frozen Edward from. And he knew for a fact that, when the battle that originally (or eventually) broke history was to take place, Edward would make a point of _not_ sacrificing himself, and he would either way tell his teammates to destroy Nathan Mechse's remains as thoroughly as possible at all costs. The only way all of what had transpired could make any sense were if the two timelines had coexisted from the beginning after all, as earlier speculated by Edward's dipartite paradox hypothesis, but if this was the case going back in time only allowed Edward to escape to a new timeline and had not truly fixed anything for the _other_ timeline. Edward and Zoë had still died, Allan had still messed up fatherhood, and Vicky was still broken. Wolfram had been incinerated in vain, and the world, at least for them, was still a horrible place.

He stepped off the craft and came upon three surprised faces that were still pointing their weapons at whatever was going to disembark from the Hazard Inc vessel, and one robotic face that was mostly expressionless apart from its artificial eyebrows being raised. He also saw the dismantled remains of the bomb that had started everything. Allan spoke first: "Edward… how is this even… is this a trick?"

Without a word, Edward produced the necklace given to him what was, in a sense, but not technically, many, many years ago.

"What exactly is going on here?" Zoë said sounding more than somewhat confused.

"It's a long story involving time travel and a black hole."

Allan firmed the grip on his trident anew. "Anti-Edward! We have to act now! Just give us a few moments to thaw your present self out and well get right to action"

Edward calmly raised a hand to chin level. "That's not necessary at all. I've taken care of it and everything is going to be **GET DOWN!** "

It was _that_ stench. The smell Edward learned meant that he needed to immediately not be where he is when he catches it, and leave calculation and reason for, at the very least, a split second later. The explanation had to be that the last impact between Nate Beta-Unit and Metal Jack sent them _both_ hurtling into the black hole, and Jack had been silently and stealthily following Edward from Hazard Inc. in the same way he had first followed Edward from Antarctica, whatever that was. Snow turned directly to steam in a violent hiss as a glowing deathly orb burrowed into it.

"Fireballbad tridentyourfriend." Edward advisingly blurted to Allan who understood and nodded immediately.

There was the moment before each battle where the two sides intensely look at each other, then Edward charged, sword first and with a fist of freezing liquid nitrogen. Metal Jack sidestepped in accordance with Edward's anticipation and suffered a flash-freezing punch to his human side in passing. He fired another fireball at nearly point-blank range, but it traveled about half an inch before it dissolved against a pinpointed blue trident beam waiting right outside the barrel. Its human hand caught the grappling hook flying at it, tugged hard pulling it out of Vicky's hand, and lashed it back. It curled around the nuisance of a trident and he pulled tight again, plucking it out of Allan's grip. In two smart moves he managed to disarm two of his adversaries. The next moment a redhead rocketed circles around him on electrified feet, blasting a powerful current at her center of orbit, which was Metal Jack. With great strain he put out his armcanon and fired a stream of metal pellets, which his attacker inevitably collided with. As Vicky transformed to heal her friend, Nate Beta-Unit boosted forward, only to collide with a devastating fireball. Metal Jack was now firing them in a frenzy at the remaining mobile adversaries. It was very fortunate that Allan managed to retrieve his trident, which he was spinning diagonally above his head while beaming, effectively creating a conical barrier above his huddled teammates. Nate Beta unit was sitting on the floor a small distance away, sparking violently, having lost all mobility in his lower body after taking a hit from the fireball. It was not looking good.

Then Edward remembered, and reached into his pocket. "Nate! Catch! There's a program on this CD that's going to fix you right up!"

The disc slid into the slot in Nate's upper body. Shortly after wires grew from broken joints, and sparks like welding melted parts together. Edward's best guess at how it worked was by means of nanotechnology. Nate quickly sprang to his feet, activated his forcefield and charged back at Metal Jack. With the fireballs now ricocheting off the shield, the team could regroup. When the forcefield faded, Nate was standing right in front of Jack and was blasted aside again. As Nate moved away in front of him, Edward stepped toward Metal Jack and eyed him challengingly. The fireball that flew from the armcanon was immediately met by Vicky's yellow beam from above, and it dropped to the floor by Metal Jack's feet, destroying the ground he was standing on. Metal Jack saw the world turn blue and white, right before it returned again, only somewhat wavy behind a curtain of water. Allan's nose bled as he strained with everything he had to maintain a compressed platform of ice beneath Jack's feet, _and_ pull this platform, with a column of water surrounding its occupant out of the hole in the floor. Before he could do anything an intense stream of electricity from Zoë was surging through him in his inundated state. Finally, Edward wielded his diamond-bladed sword, glowing yellow in a cloud of neutrons, and plunged it into Metal Jack's chest containing the nuclear power source

The part nobody thought ahead of happened, as the clichés go, in slow-motion. Small explosions ruptured parts of Jack's body. They continued, growing larger and made an expanding circle of water take the place of the ice that made up the floor. The four heroes not only pictured their demise, but also the global flood they had come to prevent. Then a barrier-coated Nate Beta-Unit stormed at the sinking, exploding Metal Jack and created _another_ forcefield around it, containing the holocaust.

The silence that followed was broken by Nate Beta-Unit. "Barrier within a barrier. I was _hoping_ something like that was on that disc."

"So you don't know as such what new functions you've gained?" Vicky clarified.

"And you can only discover them by enquiry?" Edward hypothetically deduced.

"That seems to be the case." Nate concluded.

"What now, though?" Zoë asked with a wrinkle on her forehead. Do we continue on with two Edwards?

"No," Edward said. "Leave me there."

"But I technically _promised_ you I'd come back!" Allan protested.

"I know you did," Edward comforted, "But they're going to need me in a different timeline."

"Shouldn't we at least leave a note or something?"

"Nah. I'll be fine."

On the long ship ride home Edward felt better. On a different timeline, fifty odd years from now, a great man named Wolfram will save a broken world by unfreezing an ancient hero from a parallel reality. Together with his and his brothers' descendants, he will infiltrate the enemy headquarters and rid the world of Professor Tech, the Alphaproducer, and the Biogenesis 5000 and, finally, Metal Jack. All that will be left for the descendants will be to rid the world of the mecha-biotroops and anti mecha-biotroops, which will not be too difficult thanks to the immense amount of energy drained from the beginnings of a black hole and the equivalent endings of a supernova by one of them. That will be _their_ time, and the world will begin to heal. It is truly never too late.

On a deserted Island somewhere a silver figure that had been lying in the shallows eventually washed ashore. When all the saltwater had drained from its central processing unit, two glowing yellow eyes flickered on. It stood up and walked to a dryer spot on the beach. It had no memory of companionship, or of the role it had played in saving the world, or even of any but its most basic functions, such as standing up and walking. It stood there for a while. It was not going to grow hungry, it was not going to grow tired, and it was not going to grow lonely. Then it suddenly became aware of its ability to make a decision.

It decided to sit down under a palm tree, look at the waves, and watch to see if anything worth waiting for was going to happen.


	3. Chapter 3

Humans are made of cells. Different types of cells in different arrangements. If you have a means of exactly describing the way these cells are arranged –such as DNA– you can exactly describe a person. Similarly, houses are made of stone. Different types of stone in different arrangements. If you have a means of exactly describing the way these stones are arranged –such as a building plan or blueprint– you can exactly describe a house. To take it a step further, if you used the description of one house to build another, you could have two exactly identical houses, barring the factor of human error. Rather, if houses had a way of building themselves given a description, you could have two exactly identical houses.

Humans are not like houses. For starters, they have a way of building themselves given a description.

Cloning is a highly controversial topic to say the least, and will be for quite some time until most of the human race can come to some sort of agreement. On the other hand, Leather Jack practically _breathed_ controversy, so the moment the idea struck him he could not wait to try it. Having a large sum of money and an impossibly intelligent scientist/engineer (who values money and power more than he does the greater good) on your side can get you most of what you want, even if you're a psychopathic megalomaniac. So inevitably the cow skin-clad villain of this world managed to clone our heroes, Allan and Edward Kidman, Victoria Honeywell and Zoë Wright.

Of course, it would not have been a Hazard Inc. scheme if the recipe did not include 'add evil to taste' somewhere, which it obviously did. Leather Jack added a special ingredient to each of his four special creations:

The Vicky clone had only one form, not two like her original. She looked like Vicky as far as she kept her mouth closed and her wings hidden. Reason being her canines were scarily elongated and her wings looked more like those of a bat than a white butterfly. Other differences included her beam - it drained energy from living beings which it fed to her - and her choice of clothing - which would have any conventional man grinning eagerly before becoming fear-stricken at the sight of her smiling back.

Zoë's clone had strawberry-blonde hair with crimson streaks, as opposed to Zoe's red hair. Her eyes were a lighter, yellower green and she had a yellow lightning bolt tattooed on her right shoulder-blade (it looked unlike a lightning bolt in that it had black outlines. This gave it a more sinister appearance but also made it more visible on its pale canvas). Her electrical power was largely superior to Zoë's at the cost of some of her speed.

The clone of Allan looked frightening with cyan-coloured crocodilian eyes as well as visible gills down the sides of his neck. His hair was black and red and his answer to Allan's hydrokinesis was aerokinesis that grew more powerful in more humid air. His trident looked less like an age-old weapon or fishing instrument and more like a modern day work of mad science, which it was.

Clone Edward looked most like his original. His hair looked like Edward's hair on a difficult day and his eyes were closer to semi-tarnished brass than brown. His power was much the same as Edward's, but he was more reckless with it. His favourite offensive maneuver was a miniature nuclear explosion in the palm of his hand (By the wonder of Hazard Inc. science it did not harm him). His sword had a curved blade of something like diamond dyed deep red.

As a final insult to his adversaries, Leather Jack altered the clones to pair up the wrong way round: Allan with Zoë and Vicky with Edward. As their first insult to their creator, the clones refused to follow orders. As it normally goes with overdone scientific ventures often, they broke their way out of the Hazard Inc. building leaving much of it in ruin and ran away to live free lives. Free to battle our heroes as villains in their own right.

The thought struck Edward like a brick. There had been many sides to the power contained in the gland his mortal enemy had given him. At first it was any atom he could think of, from the mediocre ones that seemed to make no difference at all to the really dangerous ones where he would have to ask his teammates to step away or leave the room. Later came these stable elements, but not in their natural, neutral phase. Liquid Nitrogen was his most useful of these. Then came plasma, an excitedly glowing, ionized gas that pumps out sheer energy. When his clone arrived on the scene, the latter soon discovered nuclear explosions. Small ones, of course, his hatred for the person he was created from was so great that he would have preferred to see his face at his moment of demise, and at such close range a holocaust is barely practical what with first getting his teammates a safe distance away and all. Edward's clone was evil, but he still had a bit of Edward's rationality. Edward could make the explosions, too. These obviously meant sub-atomic particles, like the accelerated neutron you need to set off a chain reaction.

In a more recent adventure Edward discovered he could trigger a supernova. An extremely strange chain of events saw him save the world with a phenomenon that certainly would have destroyed it under any other circumstance.

When Edward sat thinking about other possibilities, his mind arrived at something that was _really_ noteworthy: his mind arrived at a photon, or many photons. That is to say radiation: Light or heat (depending on the frequency), or many other types. There are electromagnetic waves in existence that can pass through flesh but not bone, commonly used to take X-ray photos. Some on the other hand can alter DNA, the molecules that make an individual what he or she is; the blueprint for any living being; the possible effects of this idea are nearly endless in number, but one thing is certain: more bad possibilities exist than good ones.

This new hypothetical side of his ability, if he could break matter down that far, had untold potential, but even more untold risk. He could try to bestow a new power on one of his teammates and wind up killing them, or he could try to gravely damage a biotroop and end up making it more powerful. If this side of his power existed, it would not be safe to use it unless he could understand it fully, but he could not understand this side of his power if he did not practice using it. In conclusion, it was best left as a concept and nothing more. But Edward had not spent all this time thinking of it for no reason: Although Edward would have been more than happy to let this sleeping dragon lie, he was not the only one that could enter its cave. He spent all this time thinking of it because if he could do it, his clone could do it.

The Kidman brothers had a niece, Charlotte. She was in her early teens and wore a black, form-fitting long sleeve shirt and matching tights, the combination of which covered her from her neck to her wrists all the way down to her ankles. Over this she wore a grey miniskirt with her personal symbol – which can only be described as an eye-and-crossbones – embroidered on it. Some might have called her "Edgy". Her long, flowing black hair hung all the way down to her hips and her fringe hung all the way down to her left cheek, usually over one of her bottle-green eyes. Charlotte had a gift of her own: while most people see in three dimensions by virtue of two eyes, she could see in four by virtue of a special mind. She could look down time and see what the future held. Sometimes she got hit by glimpses of future events and then knew what had to be done to ensure the best outcome. Most importantly, she could look at a choice and see its consequences. She did not carry any visible weapons, unless you counted her black fingerless gloves: they were outfitted with wormhole technology – Pilfered from the System – which always kept her supply of chemical-filled capsules at arm's reach, even though it stayed at home. With these chemicals she could quickly incapacitate man, beast or machine, as long as her throw was good. Sometimes she would jokingly call herself "the venom fairy".

Edward walked up to Charlotte who was sitting on her bed with headphones on her head and her face in her cellular phone, gently bobbing her head to rhythmic explosions that sounded like little more than guitar to anyone who didn't share the same pair of ears.

"Do me a favour, would you, kid?" he said. He simply _had_ to know

"Yes?"

Edward held a caterpillar in one hand and held his other hand's palm up to it. "What will happen if I do what I'm about to do?"

She shut her eyes for a moment and then slight nausea spread across her face. She nearly gagged. "I'm not cleaning the carpet!" she said quickly.

"What? What did you see?"

"I'm not sure. It looked really cool and really gross at the same time. Your hand started glowing white, then there was a flash from it. When it hit the caterpillar the poor thing swelled, curled up and split down the middle," She answered. "I think it was allergic," she added.

"Oh dear. It's as I feared."

Charlotte already knew what he was talking about.

It was easy to convince the team they had to be extra careful.

A few days later while the team was having lunch Charlotte put down her fork and stared at nothing. The team knew her expression and what it meant.

"What do you see, sweetie?" Vicky urged her.

"It's you!" she said. "In your healing form. You look old, but hurt badly. And I don't see water anywhere." Horror swept across her face like a swarm of black locusts. An uncommon site on the face of a girl who could often spend a Friday night watching the scariest movies until the sun came up. "I… I think you're dying!"

"Can you see where I am?" Vicky would have preferred to be ready for something like this when it happened.

"You... you're looking back at me. I don't think you can see me, but you know I can see you!"

The figure Charlotte saw with her mind's eye spoke to her through nearly unbearable pain, gritting her teeth whenever the words grew stubborn and Charlotte repeated every word.

"Charlotte. I know you... can see me. I know... because I'm not who you think I am. My name is Clarity. I'm your Aunt Vicky's daughter. Your baby c-cousin. In your current time I haven't been born yet. I have a special understanding …of things, you see? I know how to use them... and make them work... I know how your gift works, and that's how I… know you can see me. I need you to... listen to me... carefully..."

Four figures met four other figures. The four other figures had little aspirations in life, but what they sought they sought with all their beings. They sought the defeat of the former four figures, because that was what they were created to do.

Two of the figures were named Allan, but for disambiguation one was called Clone Allan. Clone Allan stabbed at Allan with his trident, and Allan stuck out his own. The teeth locked together and they struggled.

Two of the figures were named Vicky, and had the same way to avoid confusion. Vicky transformed and lifted off the ground; Clone Vicky plunged her powerful wings downward and shot into the air. In the sky they dived, dodged and missed each other with their beams.

The naming pattern persisted for Zoë. Clone Zoë sent a blue streak of electricity up into a dark cloud. The cloud lit up and sent a yellow streak back down. It poured into her hands and made them glow brightly, and she sent a glowing white ball at Zoë. Zoë turned herself into lightning and shot toward her clone, straining as she passed through a painful curtain of light

The remaining two were Edwards. Clone Edward triggered his favourite bright explosions. Edward grunted as he lifted up a thin lead shield. When there was a pause in the danger in front of him he heaved the shield with all his might and it landed in the dust in front of his enemy, spewing up a blinding brown fog.

Allan gritted his teeth and wrenched, the clone fought back. Eventually both tridents fired and both Allans were knocked back. The original fell across the edge of a short drop and landed in a big lake. His clone got up and dived in after him. Under water all limbs are free and gravity is more of a side note. Both Allans shot around confusingly and tried to blast the other. There was also the odd swipe and parry, like two swordfish interested in the same mate. Underwater there was less air, so the original would have been at an advantage the moment he started using his remaining gift.

Clone Vicky was a quicker flier and Vicky had to work with gravity, diving and swooping to keep from being hit by her adversary, who zigzagged past her as she tried multiple tackles. After a while Vicky focused all her energy and climbed into the sky as fast as she could. Although her ascent was quite slower that what the clone was capable of, it was much faster than the clone expected. In her next attempted tackle she passed right underneath her target.

White glowing dots dripped off Zoë as she phased back into flesh and clothing. She drew a breath before lifting herself off her hands and knees and coming back to her feet. As she bent her knees and ducked forward sparks started to form around her legs and feet. She launched herself forward extending two electrified fists. Her clone ducked but was caught in the head with a knee. Both Zoës fell to the ground.

The first thing visible through the dust cloud was the sole of Edward's shoe. It slammed into the clone's face and knocked him a few steps back. He drew his sword and the deep red see-through blade met a colourless one with a sound like two giants toasting to a business deal with crystal champagne glasses. When the blades were crossed and brushed together they sang like a soprano gong made of sturdy glass. Edward leaped, swung, dodged and spun. Clone Edward jumped, plunged, blocked and rolled. Neither combatant landed a stab nor was stabbed.

When Zoë got up again and noticed her opponent seemed lightheaded, she shoved a shaft of purple light straight in her direction. The clone resisted for a while but was soon overwhelmed by strain and headache. She swooned. Zoë looked up and noticed Vicky shift back into her normal form right above a stunned clone. Vicky turned her body downward and plunged, taking out her grappling hook. Realizing Vicky could use the extra time, Zoë sent some lightning up at the clone. When the flying clone was able to recover flight again she turned straight upward and started to climb back into the skies. She could not place what felt wrong until Vicky's full weight (which was a preferred amount even by superficial standards but still not something anyone would want in an inconvenient place) pulled down at the hook in one of her wings.

She dived and twisted out of control, fighting to remain airborne until she managed to turn her body and slash through the rope with a fang. She scanned the area below her for her plummeting foe, but could not see her. Meanwhile Vicky had completed her swing right before the rope was severed. She shifted back to her flying form, spread her wings to brake herself, and braced herself.

When the two winged girls collided, one expected it and was hit on the hip, while the other did not expect it and was hit in the head. The latter fell to the earth. Vicky rubbed her hip, slowly lowering herself to the lake where the two Allan's were fighting. She saw the clone rise up while being thrashed around in a mighty whirlpool. She swooped down and scooped him up, and drove him into a nearby slab of stone.

Edward had still not made any progress in his fight, but could not shake the feeling that his opponent was holding back. He felt relieved when he noticed his teammates assemble behind him.

Clone Edward lowered his sword. "Have you seen it yet? The white lights?"

Edward sheathed his sword and swallowed "What are you talking about?" He knew the clone was not bluffing, but if he acknowledged this the clone would be satisfied that he had struck terror into them and could go for the kill. He _had_ to make him think this conversation needed convincing as one of its components while he tried to think of a plan. He was locked in a game that was something between Poker and Russian Roulette, a game that could only be played by enemies or really disturbed friends.

"I think you know exactly what I'm talking about." The Edward clone put his hand forward and spread his fingers.

Edward made a Tell: he dropped the clone's gaze and nervously put his hands behind his back.

This was all the clone needed. He smiled as he said "Don't believe me? Let me show you then." His hand started to glow but he was unaware that Edward's hands, hidden from his view, were developing a shimmer of their own.

A blast of light shot from the clone to the original. At the same moment Edward stuck his hands in the way. They were coated with silver and bounced the ray back to its origin. As the light hit the clone, he began to scream horribly. Parts of him swelled and bulged and his scream started to distort, but he was stuck in his beaming position and could not stop. Edward could not move the silver away because the radiation would have hit him. There was no other choice. He walked closer and made more silver. The others watched in horror as the plate of silver became a bowl and the bowl became a sphere with a screaming abomination inside of it.

When the sphere was closed Edward reinforced it with tungsten and then turned to his friends and said: "I don't know what's happening to him, but there's no way it can be good. We have to bury him, and bury him deep."

The metal was now too thick to hear the screaming inside. Only an ominous, low hum came from it.

"...After the sphere was buried the three... other... clones went off... the radar. They were only three and Mom and them... were four... but they were angry, _very_ angry... They didn't know... where their last member was hid...den... so they searched... for... years. As time wore on, Mom got old. So did Dad... and Uncle Edward and Aunt... Zoë. We took over defending the world... and our children started when their... powers showed. But then something terrible happened: The clones found the sphere, they got strong... and came back for revenge. They're monsters now. Dad's clone... can amplify... his friend's powers. They've... beaten us... pretty bad, but they're still angry. They've gone back... in time for proper revenge. They'll arrive... at your tomorrow. Please... please be..."

And the vision was gone.

Nina Rose and Cliff Everest were a friendly couple. They were dear friends of the heroes and often helped out when the adventures got too dangerous. They too had special gifts: Nina could freeze things simply by touching them. She was much quicker and more efficient at freezing things than Edward was when he used his liquid nitrogen. Cliff was extremely powerful. Some would use the words 'super strength', but he also had a special knack for accuracy. He had the strength to throw a boulder at a target across a soccer field, and the calculation ability to hit the bulls-eye with the pointiest bit of the boulder. Nina was average in size and a feast to behold, particularly when she smiled. Cliff had a chin like a superhero and biceps to match, and stood a head, shoulders and chest above Nina. Nina and Cliff received a call from Allan that sounded quite serious.

Jenna Starling personified the heart of gold. She was an honest, steadfast friend who had also seen many of our heroes' more recent adventures. Hazard Inc had given her gift – telekinesis - to her in much the same way and for much the same reason as they had given Edward's, but a miscalculation snuck its way into one of Hazard Inc's many stacks of paper and her power was much greater than they had thought. A suspended animation capsule shattered by itself, a few doors opened by themselves and she was free. She was not someone to be bothered about things like appearance, but if she was she would not have had anything to complain about. Basically, if the world were governed by some sort of tyrant who believed certain appearances (eye colours, hair colours, et cetera) were acceptable and others were not, everyone in the world would have looked like Jenna Starling. Blonde hair and blue eyes aside she was far from a visual stereotype as her face spoke mainly warmth and her eyes a mind that considered things rationally. Jenna received a call from Edward that sounded quite serious.

The four heroes sat at a table, along with Nina, Cliff, Jenna and Nate Beta-Unit, the robot. Time was a factor, so the discussion was to the point and lasted until they had said all that needed to be said.

First Edward explained the history, or rather future, of which they learned in the vision. Allan pointed out that they needed to discuss a plan. Since the clones tended to try and face their originals (Zoë versus Zoë, Vicky versus Vicky, and so forth), if the heroes teamed up, the clones would team up. Similarly, if the heroes split up, the clones would split up. According to the woman in Charlotte's vision, Clarity, they had become monsters. The heroes figured it meant their clones had been hit by radiation when they cracked open the capsule that contained the mutating Clone Edward. Likely they became disfigured and were given new powers. The team already knew that Clone Allan could amplify powers. They speculated along the lines of wings that could cause hurricanes and electricity that could kill an elephant. One thing was clear: they did not want the clones to work together, so they would split up. They discussed taking partners along and splitting up as far as possible. Cliff would go with Vicky, Jenna with Edward, Nina with Allan and Nate with Zoë.

The extra four all agreed unanimously:

"Right."

"You got it."

"Okay."

"Affirmative."

"Anyone who manages to beat the person they're facing, do what you can to get to someone who hasn't and help them, like we did in the story Charlotte heard from my kid," said Allan.

"Any questions?" Technically Vicky had just asked the first one.

"I have one," Cliff's hand was up. "What did Clarity mean when she said they'll arrive at 'our tomorrow'?" The ability to include chronological nitpicking when communicating over gaps in time did not come equally naturally to all.

Zoë answered him: "She basically meant a time that's many years ago to them but tomorrow to us."

"We're not exactly spoiled for time, then," Nina protested. "Couldn't she have warned us a bit sooner?"

"I don't think she could control when we'd get the message," Allan ventured, "She only knew when Charlotte _had_ the vision and what instance in time she saw."

"I _still_ would have liked a bit of extra time to prepare."

"I do not believe anything can prepare us for what we will have to face tomorrow." Nate added. And he was right: Charlotte's vision was different from the ones she usually had, it had lasted longer than was good for her and by the time it had ended her nose was bleeding. Shortly after she complained about a headache and went to bed. Our heroes had a warning. That was all.

Night fell as Jenna arrived at her home. She had battled many foes alongside her friends, but tomorrow she was to battle a monster. This was something completely different than the fights in her experience. No one ever battled monsters in real life. Horrible people like Leather Jack were often called monsters. A cyborg like Nathan Mechse or an artificial life-form like a biotroop could easily be called a monster. Even dangerous animals were sometimes called monsters. Truth be told, none of these unpleasant entities were true monsters. They were not nauseating to look at. Their minds were fairly rational. Most of them had some degree of personality that somewhat predicted the type of thing they were likely to do. Monsters had unrelenting, unpredictable cruelty, more so if you could not anticipate the type of monster you were about to face, which she could not. Thankfully Jenna's telekinetic powers had a coincidental type of symbolism. She was not only literally strong minded. Jenna Starling was as brave as your typical hero, and not easily daunted.

Cliff walked Nina to her front door.

"Are you worried about tomorrow, Cliff?"

"Very much so."

"Good. So am I. You're not on your toes if you're not worried. And if you're not on your toes you might not be ready."

"That's why I love you." He kissed her.

Nina had a way of speaking that did not make you feel better as such, but made you feel better about the way you felt. To shallow people who wanted to avoid feelings this was not a preferred quality, but to someone who understood the significance and importance of feelings this quality was worth Cliff's size in gold. Cliff would not have traded Nina for a life-sized golden statue of himself.

Four households waited for the day that was to follow.

The area lay in total waste. Most of the heroes were a few sighs away from their dying breaths. The team's healer was unconscious, possibly still alive, but certainly in no state to help anyone before her proverbial light fizzled out. One of the mothers was delirious; she seemed to be speaking to someone who was not there.

"They've gone back... in time for proper revenge. They'll arrive... at your tomorrow. Please... please be..." Something caught her mind's eye.

Her son was on the floor next to her, slowly struggling toward his nearly lifeless sister. What he was trying to do would have taken too long. There was another option, one that was a lot more dangerous but had a chance, however minute, to save them. She put her hand on his shoulder; her breath was now too short to speak. When he turned his head to look at her she pointed a shaking hand at someone closer by but a bit further away from death's door.

Not surprisingly, Allan picked a spot near a lake to wait for his hunter to show up. At the very least he knew one of the foe's abilities would be useless without any of his teammates around, but other than that he had no idea what to expect.

Clone Allan rose up out of the water until he was waist-deep. He had an ugly lump above one of his eyes and his lower lip was swollen and skew. His nails were long and filthy, as if he had spent a small eternity digging with his bare hands and not a second on personal hygiene. And he was very, very old.

"You look terrible." Allan said honestly, and even with genuine pity.

"You're about to look even worse!" The beast hissed.

When the rest of Clone Allan came out of the water, Allan saw that his hips and legs had been replaced with some sort of serpent's tail. It was long, and covered with ghastly green scales. The clone glided on it nimbly and with startling speed. A rusty trident hit Allan in the back and tore some of his skin. He curled back in unexpected (or rather underestimated) pain, dropped his own trident and fell over.

"I bet it still fires." Clone Allan had shot past and seized Allan's weapon. A glowing red fog rose up from the trident as it shook to life. It blasted a white shaft so thick that it took up all three prongs at once. When the light had subsided there was a long, wide ditch stretching from directly in front of Clone Allan into the distance. It ran through the area where Allan had been lying on the floor a moment earlier.

A few feet to the left Nina was dragging Allan by the wrist. She still had some leaves stuck in her hair.

"Get up!" she said urgently.

Allan strained himself up by his knuckles and wobbled a bit. He pulled a thick column of water from the lake and held it in front of him, diffracting the next ray just before it hit him. The ray curled to the side and destroyed a nearby slab of solid rock. Then Allan washed the water over his foe. Nina had ducked behind the monster and froze the water just as it covered the whole of his tail. Allan jumped over his clone, leap-frogging on his head with one hand and snatching back the trident with the other, not wasting the chance to smack him on the forehead with it: the bulge looked sensitive. Clone Allan roared and thrashed his arms, gashing Allan in the shoulder with a far from hygienic nail. Allan slid across the long block of ice that covered the tail, clutching his stinging shoulder with his free hand. The clone tried to turn around but could not move his tail. A small amount of effort flashed across his face as he flexed some powerful muscles. Starting by his waist, the ice shattered bit by bit until there was only a thick lump of it covering the tip of the tail. This last bit remained in place. Clone Allan smiled an ominous _thank-you_.

Allan and Nina dived in opposite directions as a large block of ice smashed the ground on which they had stood. Clone Allan's newly clubbed tail raised up again and whipped to and fro dangerously above his head. Allan launched a few beams from his trident that struck at the clone's face but seemed to do little more, and then he and Nina turned and ran. Clone Allan gargled his next nasty surprise and gave chase.

As they were walking, Vicky and Cliff became aware of a large shadow falling over them.

"What _is_ that?" Vicky asked with understandable alarm.

Both turned their heads upward but whatever had cast it was gone. They continued walking for a moment, ankle-deep in paranoia. A moment later something that sounded like an explosion suddenly threw them off their feet.

They stood back up. "What in-"

A frightening image was flapping in front of them: Clone Vicky had nearly tripled in size. Her face looked contorted from decades of hate and self-neglect (At this point, let us remind ourselves that it was _her_ significant other that had been buried somewhere all those years) and she now had two pairs of wings and three pairs of arms, the original pairs of which, too, were covered in what seemed a small eternity of digging's worth of dirt. Her fangs were grossly elongated and accompanied by an extra pair more or less the size of the original.

The two scrambled for the nearby mountain and Cliff threw the heaviest rocks he could find. They would have hit their target if Clone Vicky did not volley them back with her powerful wings. Cliff and Vicky ducked as they shattered nearby. Clone Vicky nosedived as she stuck out near toxic claws. She missed and a rope curled around her foot. As she tried to fly up again Vicky's grappling hook kept her locked in a tug-o'-war against Cliff and his good friend Gravity. Meanwhile Vicky fluttered above her head getting ready to do the one thing she knew always worked against her old Hazard Inc brand nemesis. But this was not her old Hazard Inc brand nemesis. Once the yellow light hit the grotesque being below her it bounced and charged back up at Vicky. A stunned Vicky began to plummet toward earth.

Cliff let go of the rope and ran to catch her, but the monster woman vanished with another explosion which threw Cliff back down on the floor about ten feet away and drove Vicky back into the skies. As Vicky was nearing the point of the fall where she stops travelling upward and starts travelling down again, she regained control of her muscles and stabilized herself. She looked around for her clone but saw nothing and felt very unsafe indeed.

The Sun vanished for an instant and then reappeared again. Two seconds later it vanished for a shorter instant and a second after that for an even shorter one. Vicky soon realized that the clone was circling them, and doing so at an increasing speed. As she sped up it became more and more difficult to look right at her but even more difficult to look anywhere and not see her at all. The gigantic woman blurred into a thick red and black ring, and a gentle wind that Vicky and Cliff suddenly became aware of rapidly grew in strength until Cliff lifted off the ground and joined his ally in the air.

Vicky started to swirl and soon found she was orbiting nothing uncontrollably. Something was whipping at her legs in the confusion. It was a thick brown rope. She recognized it as the rope of her grappling hook. _It might still be curled around her foot,_ she thought. She hunted for the thrashing rope and when she caught it, shifted back into her usual form (she needed the additional upper-body strength) and fought the rapidly worsening winds as she pulled herself closer to the thing that was making them.

Thousands of tiny calculations were making themselves in the back of Cliffs head. He turned himself to catch the most wind, spread his arms and legs and leaned. He drifted (barring the chaotic spinning) toward Clone Vicky, slowly building speed. His right hand made a fist.

Vicky's hand found an oversized ankle. As she became aware of her and shot forward, the woman it belonged to vanished in front of Cliff and left a smaller, younger, more beautiful image of herself behind. Vicky turned and saw four dangerous knuckles coming straight at her, and two last-minute reactions accidently fitted into each other perfectly. Vicky spun on the rope, grabbed Cliff's heel and swung him round and Cliff pulled back his arm. Something behind him knocked against his elbow. As Clone Vicky hurtled out of control the overwhelming whirlwind died down. Cliff's hands and feet hit the ground and his powerful muscles slowed him to a safe standstill while Vicky once again returned to the shape that was more comfortable in the air and parachuted herself to a halt with her wings.

Clone Vicky had just suffered a massive blow to the head, but she was far from beaten. Her wings spread and stopped her spinning, she did a lightning-fast half-loop and, flying upside-down, caught Vicky. She turned right side up again. Cliff became aware of three screams: one above him and two behind him.

Zoë was trying to plan ahead but she had no idea what to expect. She found that Nate felt the same way when she tried to get a suggestion out of him.

"Insufficient data," The robot said plainly.

For a moment neither of the two said anything, but Nate eventually managed to feel the need for broken silence. "I expect severe electrical power. Beyond that the nature of what has happened is too arbitrary, but based on previous observations I deduct that we are in great danger. I can try to get a reading on electrical outputs nearby, maybe I can find her. "

Edward had built an antenna of sorts that could measure electric fields and installed it into Nate, in case he ever needed to find Zoë urgently.

"Would you, Nate? Thanks. It might help."

The robot's hand tucked into his wrist and the sensor immerged. Red and green lights near its base blinked on and off and some beeps were coming from somewhere inside the metal torso. Something like alarm flashed across the robot's face (Nate was highly sophisticated) and he turned his eye sensors a bit to the right.

"Error!" he said.

"What is it?"

"The sensor indicates she is right over there." He pointed at a nearby volume of air "And yet my ocular receptors do not register her! Error!"

"I don't see her either, Nate." Zoë noticed a glow somewhere in the distance in the same direction as the spot her clone was supposed to be. The glow was either getting brighter or coming closer, or both.

Nate took this new data and then did something that showed a significant part of his brilliance:

"Paradigm shift:" He said "None of my sensors are faulty. She is very far away, but the magnitude of her electric field-" his processor interrupted the sentence with a calculation that needed to be made urgently, which was done in an instant that was too short for any instrument to measure. "Danger!"

Clone Zoë landed on her feet and made an expanding ring of dust as she skidded to a standstill. She looked like a cliché witch: her face was deeply wrinkled and discoloured, there was a lump on her nose and another one on her chin and her voice was rasping and high-pitched as she shrieked an unstable laugh. Her limbs were little more than bone and her body was shapeless. Her hair was grey-white and hung lifelessly in different lengths. She had the same foul hands and long nails as the previous two.

Before Zoë had her hands charged the clone launched a colossal bolt that would surely have killed them both. Nate stepped in front of the bolt and it seemed to vanish. He turned to Zoë and she saw the lights in his eyes were much brighter than usual. They almost blinded her.

"Lightning rod and auxiliary capacitor." He said helpfully, and unleashed a bright, pale blue laser beam at the clone. It burned her for an instant but she ducked it with unnatural speed and threw what looked like a ball of black lightning. It hit Nate causing him to seemingly freeze in time for an instant during which the spark gradually turned from black to grey to white and then returned to its maker. Nate fell on the floor lamely. His lights, quite literally, were out.

"Nate!" Zoë blasted electricity at Nate, assuming the lightning rod was still active. It was. Nate booted up in a fraction of a second and was back in the fight. Meanwhile Clone Zoë had a boost of power from absorbing the electricity she drained from Nate. She put it to good use by shoving it toward Zoë. It knocked her to the ground and stunned her for a moment (An effect you could only get with a _lot_ of electricity if you were up against Zoë) but she was not beaten yet. She raised a hand and loaded power into it. The next moment her hand met another ball of black lightning. As the ball charged itself off Zoë's energy it got so bright that seemed to increase in size. Zoë's eyes fell shut and her brain limited her activity to the bare necessities like breathing and circulating blood. Now she was beaten.

Edward and Jenna wandered warily through a large, barren stretch of land. The soil was dark and moist enough to cling to itself, but nothing was growing anywhere nearby.

"So… we're looking for something that looks vaguely like you," Jenna checked.

"Maybe not. He took a lot of radiation for a long time. He could look like anything"

"Then… how will we know if we see him?"

"I'm not sure. But I get the feeling we will."

As they walked in silence for the next while, Edward tried out a few possibilities in his mind, but he did not look forward to seeing any of them. After another while there was a pulse through the ground that shook both of them.

"Was that it?"

"I think so."

There was another pulse, silence and a third. The third pulse lasted longer, and built up to a rumble. A chunk of soil flew from where it was lying as a section of ground beneath it burst. A crack sprouted from the burst and trailed into the distance. On either side of the crack, the ground half parted, half crumbled away. It drew back in two directions like a stage curtain revealing what at first looked like a gigantic pool of pink something; it was half the width of a stadium across. It wobbled and oozed toward the desperately fleeing Jenna and Edward. When it came out of the giant crater where it had waited, it retained most of its shape despite not being contained. It was a gruesome thing indeed: a mountain of sickly, swollen flesh. It wobbled as it crawled onto flat ground and came to a standstill.

"WHHOOEEAAAOAAARRH!" It rumbled.

"Listen!" Edward was not sure if he needed to shout to be heard, "What happened to you was not my fault! It wasn't even my future self's fault! I can understand if you blame me, but you brought it on yourself! You had no need-"

"WHHOOEEAAAOAAARRH!" Edward was now not even sure, assuming it was listening (or even capable of listening), that it understood him.

"Leave me and my friends alone! Go back-"

A giant tentacle emerged and knocked him onto his back. What was in front of them had nothing you could with confidence call a brain, but a mind bigger than a whale. And this gigantic mind had all its cognitive power focused on a single thought: _Kill Edward._ The tentacle lashed and curled around Edward's foot. It lifted him high enough to see Clone Edward's intentions: it had a rudimentary sort of mouth that had emerged from the folds and crevices at the top. It did not look like a happy place. Edward drew his sword, pulled himself closer to the foot he was hanging from and severed the tentacle that held him up. That was when he noticed how high up he was. He plummeted to the ground in a panic but soon became aware that Jenna was slowing his fall.

"Thanks. You're literally a life saver," he said as his feet gently touched ground.

Meanwhile the tentacle he had cut off grew back. Edward stabbed at the mass in front of him and the blade sank in effortlessly, but it seemed to have no effect. It did not even bleed. And when he pulled his sword out the hole closed up again. Jenna massaged her right temple and focused. Her powerful mind pulled and stretched at a section of the bulk in front of her for a while; then she got a sharp headache like a spear through her brain and was thrown back. She hit the ground hard and lay there for a while twitching in agony.

"This isn't good," Edward murmured weakly.

Allan and Nina sped through a field shouting in terror as a half-man, half-serpent pursued them while breathing powerful jets of water with poisonous barbs in them. Allan could send the water back but the barbs were sleek and smooth and would not have yielded if their suspension medium suddenly changed direction. So great was the fear in him and Nina that they did not notice as they ran straight past Cliff. Cliff however noticed the woman of his dreams, saw the panic in her eyes and immediately disliked whatever was causing it.

When he turned to look at his new foe, he saw not a frightening beast with a dangerous weapon and a heavy clubbed tail, but a pesky thing who wanted to hurt his beloved. Cliff stuck out both hands and when the clone went past him, gripped the lump of ice on the tip of his tail like an averagely strong person would carry a large television. He dug his heels into the ground beneath him and tightened his hold.

At the same moment Allan heard alarm in a voice _he_ loved. When he looked up he saw the owner of the voice being held upside down by what looked like something from the imagination of someone truly disturbed. This semi-human was holding Vicky with two of her hands and pulling at her wings with two more of her hands, like a sadistic child would pull at the wings of a harmless insect. They looked like they were about to break off. Panic turned to rage.

"Nina!" He called out to his co-pursued and turned to face the next wash of deadly water. He shaped it like a javelin and turned it to the sky. Nina froze it solid as six venom-covered splinters hid themselves in Allan's neck.

Driven by a similar force Cliff was getting the monster on the other end of the tail into a spin. As Clone Allan gained speed swinging around him, Cliff noticed a transparent spear of sorts stab one of the wrists that was holding Vicky. Both hands recoiled and dropped her. He let go of the ice and roared like an Olympic hammer thrower as the serpent beast launched toward the bat monster. They connected in the sky and plummeted to their doom in dual dazes. As the air around Allan darkened he dragged himself to the place Vicky would hit the ground. Vicky whirled toward the earth, her recently abused wings could not even strain themselves against the rushing air to a large enough degree to alter her direction (this was somewhat of a blessing in disguise) and there was no healing them without water.

When she was supposed to hit the ground she hit something considerably softer but the impact still dealt her great damage: she broke both her legs, an arm and several ribs, but she was still conscious albeit momentarily. Allan did not look as good. Vicky rested her remaining hand on Allan's face, palm down. A warm light spread across him as his splintered bones put themselves back together and the holes in his punctured throat spat up the barbs and closed up again. His eyes opened and focused to reveal a badly battered Vicky, just barely conscious.

He stood up and lifted the injured woman in his arms. "Go help the others!" he said to Nina and Cliff and carried her back to the lake where his fight started, gently talking to her to keep her awake until they could get to the water.

Nate had a small, red haired girl slung across his shoulder. His booster feet flared blue as he rocketed upward. He dodged left and right as his sensor warned him of thick white blasts that came up behind him. When he was high enough he lowered the discharge of power from his feet and hung there, keeping Zoë relatively safe. He shot some lead bullets (purer energy projectiles, he found, were not effective in this situation) but they missed. His lightning rod system was risky to use, since he was made of metal and holding Zoë. The dreaded black ball showed up again and followed Nate around like a heat seeking missile.

"Zoë! Please reboot!" He shook her gently. Nothing. He flew this way and that avoiding the black ball, and hit it with some plasma. It lit up slightly and returned to its source. A shaft of sparks slightly bigger that the usual ones came from below and hit Nate's boosters. Fuel leaked out of them, faster in one than the other. By the time his auto-repair fixed the damage one of the boosters were empty and the other had switched to frugal usage due to being nearly empty. Nate had a stabilizer system in case his boosters were ever made unbalanced but it could not compensate for the extra weight he was carrying. As Nate slowly descended toward earth several alerts were raised in his main processor, this was the robot equivalent for the mood which causes one to say 'oh' followed by a cuss. Nate's databanks were used to store things more useful than robot cusses.

"Oh, null!" He said.

Some of the alerts died down as Nina and Cliff came running up. Zoë was still in grave danger, but at least now he could keep her safe while they remained in the air. His priorities realigned themselves as follows: The Zoë clone's main objective was to do away with her original, but with Zoë out of reach and two formidable foes to deal with it would be a tricky venture. On the other hand, the moment he touched ground, an unconscious Zoë was a proverbial sitting duck. There was a chance that, given enough time, Clone Zoë could be beaten by the newly arrived allies, so the more time spent keeping Zoë in the air, the better her chances of survival.

He did the robot equivalent of gritting his teeth and focused his circuits on the remaining booster, even skimming the edges of performance beyond safe extent. They were still a long way from the earth but drifted slowly downward as the tiring robot fought to remain in the sky.

Nina froze one of Clone Zoë's hands, causing a short-circuit. Cliff came running up and landed a punch backed by his full weight. The monstrous woman flew a distance and struck the ground. As she got to her feet Cliff came charging and aimed another but received a frozen slap against the ear. The Ice shattered and Cliff reeled before falling over. A stream of sparks rushed through him but was cut short as a peg of ice stabbed the ground in front of him and intercepted it. Ice Darts formed from the moisture in the air in front of Nina and sped toward their target, who ducked them and aimed lighting back. The sparks lamely met a screen of ice and returned to the earth. An explosion of white light happened by the clone's feet and sent her powering in Nina's direction. She broke through the ice wall as if it was paper thin and caught Nina by the neck.

Meanwhile new alerts popped up in front of Nate's eyes as his remaining booster began to weaken, but different variables fed into his calculations when the weight he was carrying suddenly started to lessen.

"Let me carry that for you."

Nate looked up and saw Vicky smiling nobly above his head. She held Zoë by the arms and her wings were good as new. The strain in his systems eased as his power levels returned to their safe zones. "I am thankful to register your presence," he said relieved.

"Give your flight systems a rest and go help Cliff and Nina. They look like they could use a hand. Allan should be joining them shortly. I'll take care of Zoë."

With Nina struggling in her grip and Cliff twitching on the floor behind her, Clone Zoë looked up and Saw Nate plummeting toward her with new found determination in his eye-lights. She gave an evil grin, raised her free hand and aimed another Energy Drainer.

Zoë became aware of a warm light on her face. Her system recovered from the shock of having the energy sucked out of it, but her blood sugar was still dangerously low. Vicky caught her up with recent events but when they looked down the ball of whitened plasma was already returning to its source and Nate was falling lifelessly.

"Let me... down there." Zoë panted desperately.

"You don't have any-" Vicky began, but Zoë struggled and dropped.

"Zoë!" Vicky called after her. Zoë turned herself into electricity and started to burn the last of her power.

Horror flashed across Allan's face as he came on the scene. Cliff was lying lifelessly on the ground, Nina had just collapsed lifelessly on the ground, Nate was falling lifelessly toward the ground, Vicky hung helplessly stunned overhead, with no idea where to begin and Zoë was nowhere to be seen. The clone looked ominously energized and was putting out a hand in his direction.

With Zoë coursing through his circuits Nate came back online. In a matter of Nanoseconds he surveyed the situation he was crashing down toward. His lateral thinking processor filled in the gaps and unveiled the best course of action. His remaining booster gave a dying boom as it powered him toward Allan. He landed in front of Allan and extended a hand that intercepted a giant pillar of lighting just as it burst from Clone Zoë. His lightning rod absorbed every last atom of it. Now he was at the risk of overload and a glowing, supercharged Zoë flew out of him. Right before the Witch-like woman decided to ready her deceptive dodge, her sight was flooded with yellow light from something above her head and all her muscles stiffened. Helplessly she watched as trident, laser cannon and electric palm gave it their all. Pale blue, green and violet-white rays sent pain through her and her eyesight slowly faded to nothing.

Edward helped Jenna up and they ducked behind a tungsten shield as a snake of fire rumbled out of the gigantic thing in front of them. As it got too hot to hold Edward crashed it into the giant, heavy cloud of sickness. It sank and dissolved. There was another rumble as spiked roots burrowed into the soil underfoot. The two people dived as one of the roots burst from the ground beneath them. Edward rushed to his feet and ran straight ahead of himself as one by one, more broke from patches of ground just as his feet was leaving them. Jenna closed her eyes and spread her arms while her mind seized each spike, pointed them inward and drove them as hard was she could. Again there seemed no reaction as they penetrated the surface effortlessly and vanished in the depths of the Thing that it was getting harder to believe was cloned from Edward.

"When it held me up there I saw a sort of mouth at the top!" Edward shouted above the deafening moans and roars, "Maybe if I can get some fire in there we can get somewhere!"

He made a gigantic ball of phosphorus that burst into flames as Jenna's powerful mind lifted it into the sky. It slowly rose up, settled above its target and dropped straight down. There was a sort of splash and the blob began to screech and glow orange.

"I think we did it!" Jenna shouted.

The mass began to pulsate. Ring shaped waves along its width rippled from the ground upwards and it now made a gargling sound. Edward got the idea it was digesting and a feeling of omen drowned out the hope he had just grasped for. The thing slowly flattened and widened, then like from a spasm it stiffened and erupted a glowing pillar of thick, glowing molten liquid into the sky. Edward ducked and Jenna stuck her arms up as the liquid phosphorus and tungsten (and who knows what else?) rained down on them. Jenna parted the drops right above them and Edward solidified the flow on the floor around them with liquid nitrogen. Green sparks began to cloud the air around what Clone Edward had become. Edward and Jenna were in no mood to see what they did. He froze a path and ran along it and she ran after him. Once they were at a safe distance the air around Clone Edward was flooded in green light and Edward and Jenna felt an intensely hot wind from it.

So far they had dealt it negligibly little damage and Edward was running out of energy.

If they ran back to have a look, they would have seen that the crater the thing had emerged from earlier had two new sets of footprints in it. The one set was unevenly spaced, like the person who had made them was limping. The other followed the first closely, and looked more like two long furrows, as if the one who had made them was being dragged by someone.

Edward and Jenna stood facing the thing that was relentlessly trying to kill them. In their hearts they were beginning to realize there was no beating it. As it oozed closer they took a step back. They took another step back. They tried to take another but found that they could not: Something was stiffening their limbs. Slowly they lifted into the air. Edward swallowed, Jenna shuddered.

Suddenly a large muscular man dashed toward the monstrosity and landed a heavy punch on it. Ripples spread out from the point of impact and had no other visible effect except that Edward and Jenna were released from its telekinetic hold. They landed on the ground where the others were already gathering. Zoë helped Jenna up and Allan helped Edward. Cliff came running back.

" _That's_ what we're up against?" he said "It's absolutely _huge_!"

"I know. I'm out of atoms and we couldn't even dent it!"

"Zero weaknesses detected!"

"Then we'll just have to _force_ it down! **PREPARE TO TASTE TRIDENT, FREAK!** "

Eight brave fighters gave it everything they had. Lightning flared, weapons swung, beams fired and there were many kicks and punches, but nothing seemed to be helping. Most of their attacks simply bounced off and any damage they did was instantly healed. They began to tire but the power they faced seemed endless. After a while they came back together to try and discuss a next plan. No one had one, but each hoped the others had thought of something. They found a small hollow in a wall and slipped in unnoticed.

"This is bad," said Cliff, "we're not getting _anywhere_."

"It looks like this is the end." Zoë wailed.

"NO!" Allan protested. "We've come too far to end it here. There must be _something_ else we can do."

"We already did everything we could," Vicky said hopelessly, "what more can we do?"

"No, Allan's right," Edward protested with the last of his dwindling optimism, "Charlotte Saw a woman who looked like Vicky. She said she was Vicky's daughter. I know it seems impossible but we survive this. I don't know how but we do. She spoke of us getting old! Having children! Having _grand_ children! In fact, I've seen-" then he remembered what he learned about splitting timelines and a voice inside him said _not necessarily. This thing came back in time_. All hope vanished from his mind. He turned away and fell to the floor. "Yeah, you're right, we're all about to die." He buried his face in his palms.

"Edward?" Allan's astonished voice came from behind him.

"No! Don't you see? It-"

"How...?"

Edward looked up.

"Wolfram!"

A man who looked remarkably like Edward gently set the man he was supporting down and then collapsed to his hands and knees.

Edward stood up and gave him his hand. His mood had instantly brightened. "It's wonderful to see you alive, my lad."

"Edward? What's going-"

"Zoë! Come over here! Let me introduce you. This is Wolfram, our son."

Zoë stared as Wolfram bowed and kissed her hand. "Mom! You look just like my little Nova," he said happily.

"How did you _get_ here?"

A sudden recollection raced to Wolfram's mind and kicked out the mood of the reunion. "Where's Aunt Vicky?" he said urgently.

During the onslaught that ruined his home, Victor had chosen to copy the best ability he possibly could. Amplifying his mother's power allowed her to speak to him with her mind. When he Amplified Wolfram's power it seemed to the latter like the world with its five dimensions suddenly unfolded itself and there were paths that twisted across them all. Wolfram knew these were timelines. Not timelines like the ones he could cross, but individual timelines. The trails left in space-time by the creatures and things that existed within it. The evil beings that had just laid waste to his home slipped into the past and left a thick, clear trail. He took Victor and followed it, soon finding himself in the days of his parents' youth. He knew he was close to them and they needed each other's help. He dragged his fading nephew along until he found the hollow where they were hiding.

Vicky healed Victor not a moment too soon: he was no longer breathing and his heart had nearly stopped. He took a gasp and then he panted for a while with his eyes closed. When his mind returned he looked at the figures stooped over him and smiled.

He turned his gaze to Allan. "Gramps," he said hoarsely, "Look at _you_!" He got up and walked to the left and right, staring at the people in front of him like a boy going through his parents' old photographs. After a while he moved to the edge of the small cave-like hollow and looked outside at the monster that tried to destroy all the people he loved. When he turned back to face his allies his smile was gone.

"Victor..."

He hugged himself and amplified his basic ability.

"Victor?"

He took a power from Cliff.

He took a power from Vicky.

He took a power from Nina.

He took a power from Zoë.

"Victor!"

He took a power from Edward.

He hugged himself again and amplified them all.

"I want to thank you all for everything, but I have to go now or I might be too late. Uncle Wolfram, you can go home when you're ready. I'll see you then." He walked out.

Clone Edward sensed someone familiar. He lashed out a tentacle. Victor caught the tentacle with one hand, took a power from it, plucked it out and threw it aside. Spikes burst up from underground, stabbing the place where Victor had stood right before he had shot into the air. He landed on the monster, froze it into something like a glacier and slid down. He crawled underneath it and lifted the entire thing above his head. Sparks crackled as he turned himself and the frozen abomination into lightning, then into light, and they were gone.

Decades later Scientists were baffled as an evidently enormous star which they had absolutely no knowledge of exploded somewhere multiple light-years away from earth.

The same amount of decades later a beam of light turned into lightning as it entered the earth's atmosphere and into Victor as it struck the ground outside his house. He was several years older than the last time he had been in his human form but did not appear as such because he picked up immortality somewhere. He rushed in and caught a glimpse of the back of his own head as it vanished into the past along with his uncle Wolfram. He shifted into a white robed figure, healed all the injured people throughout the house and before he went insane, dumped all the powers he had gathered, except his own.

Once again the team saw a peril so great that it threatened the very fabric of time and space, and once again they proved that if they worked together they had the power to overcome whatever evil threw at it. Yes, the heroes had given up for a brief moment, but they only needed to lay eyes on a glimmer of a brighter future to know that all was not lost. Again bonds were strengthened and the group of heroes realized anew how important it was that they continue fighting for the Tomorrow where they saw their hard work pay off: The Tomorrow where Wolfram and Clarity would take up the proud legacy that they would pass down to generation three, and in this way the world would remain in safe hands, possibly forever.

After all the strange things Wolfram had witnessed, hugging your twenty-something parents goodbye as a nearly thirty-five-year-old man seemed a mere oddity.

"I would love if you could stay with us for a while," Zoë said, "We'd love to learn all about the future and your father and I wouldn't mind getting to know our son a bit better."

"Don't worry, Mom," Wolfram replied, "There will be plenty of time for that in a couple of years from now. Anyway, I need to get back to my _own_ kids. They've just been through something terrible and they need their father. Well, this is Victor's timeline. I'll see you all again on the day of my birth."

Everyone chorused a greeting

"Give everyone all my love." added Vicky.

"Oh, they already have it." Wolfram smiled warmly and then he vanished. In the next moment, as if watching a multiple-decade-long movie sped up to a matter of seconds, he took a trip deep into space, witnessed a supernova, and returned home to earth. He felt himself slipping off the timeline as he neared the place and time where Victor dumped all his extra abilities and as the world closed back up to the five dimensional space-time he knew so well he found himself back home with the people he loved (at the ages he knew them best) around him.

The eight heroes stood staring at the last place they saw the man who had technically not been born yet.

"Wolfram, what a wonderful name..." Zoë said dreamily.


End file.
